Hello!

This exhibition of paintings in Sedona, Arizona was conceived one and one-half years ago, as an opportunity to show a group of my paintings in a unique setting. I wanted to share with you a kind of work that perhaps has not been seen before in your community. It is exciting to me to show all new work, completed in the last few months. It is entitled the Freeway Series.

I don't know what my paintings mean, but luckily all I have to know is how to paint them. Making paintings and viewing them are two different activities. Painting addresses two problems. What color, and where to put it? But it is more than that when one goes to look at them. I think about a lot of things when I view my paintings. I have come to believe that my work of the last twenty-five years has been a spiritual quest. The Spiritual is by definition unknowable, and is like painting, in the sense that it can only be known on the non-analytical, intuitive, and subjective right side of the brain. I set up tensions in my paintings; between the flatness of the canvas and the illusion of the depicted abstract objects; between the painterly and the hard edge; between color and color; between light and shadow. These paintings attempt to probe the dimensions of time and space, while not existing in time at all, the whole artwork being viewable in an instant. Each viewer brings his own experiences to the paintings and in so doing enlargening their meaning, and hopefully in turn receives some small Spiritual Experience.

— Ronald Davis, March, 1987

 

Thank you God
for enabling me to view and be a part of the
"Mystery of it All"