Whenever I attempt to remember the details of an event in which I was personally involved, the length of time between the doing and the remembering influences the closeness of the relationship between the actual and

the fantastic.

I remember the heat of the sun, the blue sky and the yellow-orange fields. I remember the cool shade under locust and cottonwood trees, the singing of insects and of farm machinery. I remember the smell of open spaces and grain elevators and power transmission lines. I remember the cars and monsters striding and zooming about.

I associate reality with transience, and to the building up of memories, rather than with the concreteness of the present.

"The painter does not paint what he sees, he paints what he knows is."

Edward Wadsworth

I am fascinated by the atmosphere of tension and anticipation generated by open space and large scale, and by ambiguous forms in incongruous places. I believe that memories of past experiences overwhelm the immediate perceptions of present experiences, coloring their meaning and shifting their importance; while at the same time the circumstances of the present tend to erase the details from the memories of the past.

What I think I remember is in a constant state of flux, the organization and arrangement of particulars controlled and altered by every new experience, to the point where even the mundane can be reformed into the epic. All of my work is made with the intention to examine what remains of the actual, reveal the process of alteration, and explore the possibilities of the fantastic.

“The monster is the king of the land of the silence stretching out between us.”

David Thomas

I have attempted to develop a pictorial language, which communicates these ideas of memory, place, tension, and anticipation by connecting a representation of the viewable world to the conjured images of my memory. On one hand, I try to produce an effect of time compressed, obliterating the minutia of life, while on the other hand, exploiting the physical structure of this minutia, enlarging and expanding it to the point of overwhelming time itself.

I look back at my life through the maze of my memories with nostalgia, but without sentimentality, in order to realize the uncertainty within the familiar. Every remembrance is a reinvention, and reality is not fixed, but in process."

Kenneth Ragsdale