His subjects derived mainly from photographs, and ranged from a portrait of Theodor Adorno to interpolations of fashion photography to unadorned apartment interiors. For Rick, drawing was a language that allowed him to lay claim to the images from the world around him. Drawing those images allowed him to disengage as a passive receiver, and instead promote a sustained contemplation of the world.

Although he produced hundreds of drawings before he died 2007, few people, other than his friends, saw any of them. For Rick, working in his kitchen with pen & paper was a consuming devotion to the experience of drawing itself, a personal effort to re-differentiate images from their fetishized replicas.

The drawings displayed in the Vermilion show were selected from a large body of Rick's work, and demonstrate the artist's use of line drawings to evoke a unique sense of space. His images of faces, dancers and still lives appear simultaneously obscured and sharply focused -- directly evoking one of Rick's central themes: that images have replaced ideology as the most powerful agent in the human sphere.