Artist's Statement

 

MEMORY AS PROCESS

 

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 my present existence.

 

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

—Edward Wadsworth

 

I am interested in the atmosphere of tension and anticipation generated by open space and large scale, and by ambiguous forms in incongruous places.

 

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.

 

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

—David Thomas, Monster Walks the Winter Lake

 

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.

 

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."

 

 

 

© 2015 Ken Ragsdale