Introducing, Charles Ramsburg, Drawings

Wednesday, February 24 to Saturday, March 21, 2009

Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11 to 5

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is pleased to announce an introduction to the art of Charles Ramsburg. This long time resident of the Southwest has been living in Greenwich Village, New York for the past decade. We are showing 12 of his small scale drawings, as an introduction to his art.  Ramsburg’s vision can be called obsessive; this quality is reflected in his carefully attended and tenderly worked surfaces. His fascination with the overall ground of an image is what dictates the subject of the work; while the persistence of detail remains intact whether he is seeing a piece of meadow three feet from his eye or a stand of trees three hundred feet in the distance.  The artist was born blind in one eye, creating a lifetime of monocular vision, so that in his broad landscapes there is no vanishing point, no perspective, this is also true of his close-up views of nature.  The subject becomes a graceful surface with a narrow dimension of depth.  The artist works in one, two and three dimension, and this preoccupation with surface and detail is immediately apparent in all of his art. 

         Hedge Row IV, charcoal & Conte crayon on paper, 8 x8 inches, 2008
Ramsburg works in black and white, using Conté crayon, charcoal and various implements to lift, lighten or remove the blacks. Upon seeing these drawings I was swept up by the graphic sensuality of their cumulative touches and marks, as well as the secrecy and mystery of the image. I thought, at first, I was seeing a mezzotint, the blacks are velvety and the grays have a pearl like quality.  The overall softness of the surface seems to speak of the sensitivity and love the artist lavishes on them, so gentle is the effect of the artist’s technique. This delicacy of detail makes Ramsburg’s work transformative.  These drawings range from 5 x 5 to 8 x 10 inches, and articulate the artist’s abiding interest in going from the macro to the micro, while always keeping the level of detail comparable. Charles Ramsburg’s entire oeuvre expresses this fascination with taking in the entire field and slowly whittling it down to a one to one proportion. One can view his work the same way, take it all in at once and little by little work your way down to an inch by inch approach. The physical boundaries of the drawing may melt into the rhythmic variations of dark and light surfaces, with their sensitive shifts from black to numerous grey tones.

We know that the work of Charles Ramsburg will find great interest among our friends and collectors.