Ron Veasey (born 1957, Las Vegas, Nevada) has been attending Creative Growth since 1981, and is one of the organization's longest practicing artists. Although Ron’s process has evolved in technique and scale during the last four decades, his fundamental interests in the human gaze and using the body as a vehicle for color and line have remained central to his practice. Whether his paintings incorporate a sideways glance or an angular gesture, his carefully considered portraits are completed methodically, and with great intention. For Ron, inspiration comes from source material. His early work translated images from fashion magazines, and we can easily see the throughline of his attraction to intense emotion and simplified form in his recent series of portraits.
Work featured in this series is drawn from the catalogue of Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, a 2011 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. If photographs are filters of reality, then Ron's paintings are conversations with the photographs he selects. His portraits are large and vivid—emblematic of his preference for bright colors, heightened emotion, and puzzle-like fields of abstract shapes used to portray the body. Often painted with bright yellow eyes, Ron’s figures either look at the viewer unabashedly or fiercely off to the side. Ron is able to uniquely extract the sentiment of an image through sophisticated technique and a complex understanding of human emotion.