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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.
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A Creative Growth Studio Instructor brought the Figures & Fictions catalogue to Ron in 2017, to see if Ron might connect to images that depict more people of color. Around the same time, he began to paint on large paper – a confluence that led to a landmark shift in Ron's practice.He began to focus on painting full body portraits with a reductive approach to shape and color, and honed his ability to capture expression with more depth and nuance. The photographs in Figures & Fictions highlight the complexities of contemporary issues including identity, gender, class, and race within South Africa’s contentious history. Ron’s interpretation of these photographs represents a powerfully astute insight. Because Ron is largely nonverbal, we can only understand his work through his image selection, composition, color choice, and most profoundly, the expressive qualities of his subjects. We will never truly know why Ron finds inspiration in certain photographs over others, or what emotions he seeks to investigate in his paintings. What the viewer is left with, are portraits filled with a tenuousness that could soften or escalate at any moment.
Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, ed. Tamar Garb, 2011
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“Often the photographs he’s looking at are black and white and yet he has a palette that runs towards really vivid saturated colors. He doesn't mix color or shade and sometimes he sticks closely to his resource material and sometimes he doesn't, so it's hard for me to know why he chooses what he chooses. But you know, he never talks and I've been working with him for years. So, that's the mystery of it. In some ways it’s nice to know that we'll never know.”
-Kathleen Henderson, Studio InstructorLeft: Untitled (from the series 'The Brave Ones'), Zwelethu Mthethwa, 2010 Right: Untitled (RVe 207), Ron Veasey, 2020
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“Ron spends many, many hours thinking about what he wants to do. Sometimes it'll take him half a day. And so the way I support that is to stay out of his way and let him do that, knowing that's just the time it takes for him to make the decisions. He's so fond of this particular book and I'm trying to figure out why. I have brought in other books of photography that show people of color, but he just really likes this one book. It’s kind of great when you find something that can change your life. And really, it has changed his work. It builds upon his earlier figurative work—images of couples or people from fashion magazines. He would really pare down the gestures and put them in his incredibly strange palette.”
-Kathleen Henderson, Studio InstructorLeft: Untitled (RVe 202), Ron Veasey, 2019
Right: Lerato Marumola, Embekweni, Paarl, Zanele Muholi, 2009 -
Available Artwork
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Early Work
Ron’s entire process is very deliberate. Often taking hours or days at a time to flip through fashion magazines and settle on a reference, he then takes significant time through each stage to complete his portraits. Ron uses thick acrylic paint when working on large paper, but prefers the control and color saturation of prismasticks on smaller works. Beginning in pencil, he pares down the subject to the details he considers essential, often eliminating the background entirely. Ron then commits his linework to paper in black marker by drawing interlocking abstract shapes to make up the form and articulate the facial expressions. Ron fills these shapes with vivid, true pigments and often includes his signature yellow eyes. He does not use shading or mix colors, flattening the perspective and creating graphic, sculptural portraiture.
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