Catalogue

PSA ART SHOWCASE VII
Celebrating Individual Sensibility
By Martica Sawin

The most striking quality of Ramey’s oil paintings of the landscape is their engulfing effect. The viewer is never outside the painting looking in but rather is caught up in the vertiginous pull of colliding masses, the energetic movement of a forcefully manipulated brush, and dislocating reversals of the field of vision.

Her paintings start with an emotional response to the landscape but at some point what is happening on the canvas takes over and the drama is in the color, the paint handling, and the clashes of dark and light, and only the vestiges of the inspiring field, hill, or cloud remain. One of Ramey’s real strengths is color; she uses it at full saturation in the full range of the spectrum and its lyrical quality serves as a palliative to the more difficult and challenging aspects of her work.

The Painting Center
Recent Prints

The Fleeting Eternal
by Stephen Sartarelli

Love, passion, peace, transcendence, such dreams as we may seek in the things with which we feed our gaze spring not only from the vast well within us, but indeed exist in some form in the things themselves. But things pass, and ever so swiftly, yet not even so fast as the moment in which we strive to fix them into permanence: memory, word, image-art in the best of cases.

The monoprints of Simon Carr, Sophie Hawks, and Cathy Ramey all endeavor to seize upon that transient form in which the spirit of things momentarily coincides with that of the viewing subject. They grapple with the Proteus that is the world of our dwelling: landscape, dream, imagination. Here the artist’s hand is pressed, but Olympically calm in its speed: life as it flees will not wait.

For Cathy Ramey the image is always mobile, fluid, though drawn from observation of landscape. She allows the form to shift as she paints the copper plate, often working with the ghosts of immediately preceding images. The result is a Zenlike mastery of stasis in motion, a suspension of cool serenity in the heat of the creative moment.

For Sophie Hawkes, who meditates upon landscape in an unending movement into and out of its forms, the image becomes a kind of glyph, repository of that spirit shared between the natural object and the viewing subject dissolved in it. The paint is applied often in translucent layers to the plate, letting objects beam diaphanous in earth’s shadow, allowing absence the form of presence, making form light’s vessel. The image wrought becomes a mystic communion, iconic offering.

In Simon Carr’s monoprints, the transcendent moment of creation bursts into an ecstatic dimension, yet remains ever poised between human control and divine, all-encompassing chaos. Obtained from carved woodblocks applied variously with paint and then stamped repeatedly onto the paper. Carr’s prints sparkle with the colors of a landscape long contemplated in the mind and breathlessly chiseled into burning geometries of sensation. As in his paintings, color and form here are forever becoming, forever striving.

Landscape, in the work of all three of these artists, is always moving, from time and space into some aspect that in its fleeting manifestation may hint at something more permanent, and in this intimation wrest form from the moment.

Paintings
1995 National Arts Club Catalogue
by Martica Sawin

The on-going viability of easel painting despite the recurring proclamations of its demise is affirmed in the work of these three seasoned artists. The boundless possibilities inherent in the process of applying paint to canvas are once again demonstrated by the diversity of both means and ends in the art of Simon Carr, Mark LaRiviere and Catherine Ramey, painters who are linked by their reverence for painterliness, their avoidance of facile solutions, and their desire to create something of substance.

“Substance “here refers to an artwork that reveals itself only gradually, drawing the eye back again and again to explore shifting relationships, to linger over seductive passages of color, or to ponder the ambiguities of sliding forms and conflicting spatial clues. In the work of each of these artists one has the inescapable sense that there is more than meets the eye, that something is being communicated on a preverbal level that finds its completion in the experience of the beholder.

Huddled presences seem to body forth out of LaRiviere’s Guston-like manipulation of paint, asserting themselves in clear hues against surroundings of subdued tones. These presences hover on the edge of existence, on the verge of being reabsorbed into the richly worked surface, enigmas quietly provoking insoluble questions.

The all over distribution of active brushwork and patches of bright primary and secondary colors on Carr’s square canvases are at first reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism; then one realizes that the energy generated here has more to do with light than self-affirming action. The throbbing color of his canvases results from an underlying knowledge of how to maximize vibrancy through complex color juxtapositions, but also from his willingness to set up an easel in a summer meadow of woodland and paint while immersed in the sensory experience of his surroundings.

Ramey deals more overtly with the landscape, but in such a way as to disrupt the usual assumptions of near and far, giving mixed signals to the viewer who tries to find a vantage point. Her densely painted canvases suggest an environment that cannot be known solely through recorded visual perception, one that is part seen, part intuited- an eternal space reflective of internal processes.

No painting is as pure as purists would have it, but my idea of “pure” painting is when it says things that can only or best be said in paint and when it reaches the mind through the delectation of the eye.