Number 34:  “Cone Down,” 2022-23.  Acrylic on 20-inch diameter canvas, mounted on metal and wood backing, installed as a diamond.

Last fall after making 34 paintings I fell very ill, and was unable to get a correct diagnosis until February 2023. They finally figured it out: I had severe anemia with life-threatening complications. It was rough going. I was very sick and mentally low.  I’ve been healing and feeling better, looking at these works with a new eye and new determination. With any luck, there may be a few more to come.

About the new paintings:

The “Plumb Bob” series began during the Covid quarantine in 2021 with five small rectangular paintings.  I had not put paint to canvas in 15 years, so it was a slow start.  As I worked, I decided to abandon the tyranny of the perspective grid that has shaped most of my work over the decades.  I threw out perspective and with it my trademark illusionary shapes such as slabs, dodecagons, cubes, planks, and staurolites, reverting to my flat hard-edge beginnings. (Similarly, when I was in art school at SFAI, I realized I couldn’t keep going with Abstract Expressionism which by the mid-1960s was out of gas and no longer the hot new thing. Pop art, nascent minimalism and hard-edge painting were on the way up.)

In 2021, a desire to “find the center”  drove me to pick what seemed like a cliché – a circle.  Inspiration came from one of my earliest and best paintings, “Target”, a 1963 14-inch hard-edge acrylic and canvas circle (painted on a round chair bottom found in an abandoned room at the old Primalon Roller Rink studio in San Francisco).  There is no perspective in a circle, unless you are looking down on it, as in the polar view. The idea of a plumb bob helped me find the centers.

I found there are only a few divisions I could utilize in a flat circle.   I could make concentric bands; I could divide it into any number of pie-slices including quarters; or I could give it horizontal and vertical stripes — plus a combination of all those to make a pattern such as a quartered checkerboard. “Target” guided me to spherical tops and bottoms and opposite poles of light and dark, black and white, up and down — without perspective.  

I mounted the new circles on square backings to better define their objecthood. My friend, artist Frederick Smith, suggested I try hanging them as diamonds instead, which I think was a great insight.  I’m hoping to finish the backing frames and final touchups before next year. 

Once again, it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

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Here’s an affordable way to get a little of the action, such as it is.  Find “Cone Down” as a printed, framed photo:

https://kitschen-art.com/collections/ronald-davis-12-x-12-prints

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