Ron’s Blog – Index
OBITUARY
RONALD W. DAVIS June 29, 1937 ~ November 19, 2025 I am but a box in time and space. Ronald Wendel Davis passed away on November 19, 2025 at home in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico at the age of 88. A renowned, internationally-known painter since the mid-1960s, Ronald's...
Ah, art openings
A short anecdote + unavoidable name-drop: In the late 1970s I found myself standing with Richard Diebenkorn at an exhibition at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA). (I think it was Richard's 1977 show of Paintings and Drawings, but I don't remember exactly.) While we...
Thoughts on Mondrian
When I began this last series of "Plumb Bob / Polar Series" tondo paintings, my first goal was to "find the center." Soon, I saw that the circles needed something to protect them and to confirm their objecthood, so I mounted them onto rectilinear backgrounds. During...
The Fires
My heart goes out to the victims of the California wildfires, the worst in recorded history. Gratitude to the hotshots, pilots, and all those fighting the flames. Gratitude to the communities of people helping those who have lost everything. So much of my life as an...
My friend, artist Bill Reynolds
Shazam! William Reynolds exhibition at Pie Projects, Santa Fe, NM -February 10, 2024 - March 9, 2024 - Opening Reception: Saturday, February 10, 4-6 pm. Bill Reynolds • For Wayne Thiebaud. ca 2010sBar Code series. Pastel on paper. 20 x 16 inches The images of Bill's...
Ron at David-Richard Gallery
October 17 - November 17, 2023 -DAVID-RICHARD GALLERY - NEW YORK, NY - David Richard Gallery presented Ronald Davis, Paintings: 1960s through 2010, a survey presentation of optically stimulating and perceptually challenging paintings spanning six decades of the...
Coming Full Circle
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...
The Lack Of Power
Yesterday we had an 18-hour internet blackout, including 4 or 5 hours of e-power outage. I was reminded that the lack of power is my most precious asset. To wit: The internet in many cases is expendable. The blackout happened because during a planned power outage,...
A Tenacious Yellow Flower
Join me in celebrating the 30th anniversary of my cheerful, bee-attracting yellow columbine. In 1993 a friend who was working on building my place brought it over with some other wild plants and trees from the mountain land grants. Every year since then it has emerged...
“Pixeldust”
By Ronald and Barbara Davis / Art and Technology: Getting “Pixeldust” From There to Here “Pixeldust” is my conceptual term for many recent pictures, which I create on Macintosh computers using 3D rendering and graphics software. Pixeldust refers to the elements of a...
Philip Guston – Stand Flat-Footed
Reach for essence of thought, and the mark follows. With Philip Guston in art world news recently, apparently because of the controversial acquisition of a large number of his paintings by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I thought I would relate my own...
Staurolite Power
I love staurolite crystals. They are rare, surprising geometric objects found in the dirt and rock of exposed strata in a few obscure places around the world, like Taos, New Mexico. They are beautiful and powerful. Through the decades, I have used unusual, iconic...
Barnett Newman at The Russian Tea Room
During a trip to Washington, DC in 1967 to attend the Barbara Rose-curated “A New Aesthetic” show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, my LA dealer Nicholas Wilder and I took a side trip up to New York. On that trip, Nicholas arranged for us to have tea with...
David-Richard Gallery, New York
December 1 - 30, 2022 - DAVID-RICHARD GALLERY - NEW YORK, NY - David Richard Gallery presented Optical, Shaped and Color Abstractions, Paintings: 1963 – 1965 by Ronald Davis in December, 2022 in his first solo exhibition with the Gallery and first solo exhibition in...
Ronald Davis at The Jewish Museum
March 24-October 1, 2023 -The Jewish Museum - Two-Thirds Yellow, from Ronald Davis's 1960s Slab Series of shaped, hard-edge polyester resin and fiberglass paintings, will be on view at The Jewish Museum as part of a special exhibition, After “The Wild”: Contemporary...
Dave Hickey: RIP
I was sad to hear of writer, art critic, and scholar of culture Dave Hickey's passing last month. We met in the early 2000s in Taos at Penny and Gregg Hawks' home during one of Penny's legendary parties. A few times over the years since then, Dave and I talked about...
A Conceptual Art Happening
At my opening at 203 Fine Art in Taos on September 25, 2021, I met another local artist, Helen Gene Nichols, for the first time. Helen's kaleidoscopic, tessellated conceptual works are very interesting. Like me, she is an alumnus of San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)....
Review: The Wheel is Coming Round
by Tamra Testerman, Taos News Tempo, Visual Art section, Sept. 23, 2021 – Taos artist Ronald Davis is "mercurial. He is very eccentric. He doesn't talk to writers. Email him," wrote art critic Dave Hickey in his 2015 essay, Ronald Davis Is Not Doing What You're...
Studio Shoot with Lee Clockman
Lee Clockman, Taos area photographer, came out to my studio several years ago and did a wonderful set of photos of the studio and of me. At some point over time, I somehow hit a wrong computer button on this one, and was bemused by the effect. It represents one polar...
The “Be Safe! Shrine” and The Cycle of Life
A young man named Jeff came here a decade or so ago to pick up some art, and let it be known he needed some work. It was good timing, because I needed a studio assistant; so I said I’d give him a trial. He had been working odd jobs here and there, mostly house...
Electronic Music and The Music Series
Ocean is a sound "painting" or sound sculpture that I composed and performed in 1979 on a Buchla 700 synthesizer that Don Buchla build for me in 1978. It came as a surprising discovery to me that Ocean can be described as pattern music, cycling in almost perpetual...
T Bone Burnett, Larry Poons, and that Beach Boys chord
I just bought the brand-new Beach Boys compilation release, "Feel Flows" – The Sunflower & Surf's Up Sessions 1969-1971, and it's terrific. Listening to its six hours of never-before released Beach Boys songs and studio outtakes, I was reminded of a 1970s visit...
Mr. Peanut’s Demise
Mr. Peanut died in January 2021. At the time, I was shocked and saddened. Besides that, I was devastated. When I was eight years old, I had a Mr. Peanut bank. It stood about 15 inches tall and was made of ochre plastic. I put coins in his high hat, and later used him...
Nicholas Wilder On Being A Dealer
ARTWEEK, August 24, 1974 •by Martha Alf • Referring to himself as an "art peddler," dynamic, Los Angeles-based art dealer Nicholas Wilder spoke in May (1974) to an informal gathering, composed mostly of students, but also attracting some other art world enthusiasts,...
The New Museum of Modern Art… An Artist’s View
by Ronnie Landfield • 2005 • The Cause: The Museum of Modern Art has reopened for business on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The original headquarters in midtown Manhattan has changed, with an impressive new building designed by architect Yoshio...
“The Essence Of Abstraction” by Ronnie Landfield
This essay was originally printed in the catalog that accompanied the forty year retrospective, "Ronald Davis: Abstractions 1962 – 2002," exhibited at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio in October 2002. Ronnie Landfield • The best abstract...
“3D/CG” at Eight Modern, Santa Fe, 2007
Richard Tobin, THE Magazine, April 01, 2008 • 3D/CG, a solo exhibition at Eight Modern Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM • Nov 16 – Dec 31, 2007 • VIEW and download catalog PDF • Opticality is paramount: students of photography no doubt can point to a particular moment in the...
Early Studio Days
Featured photo: Gail Chadell Nanao. Photo of Roller Rink upstairs: Unknown. In the early 1960s, I lived communally with a rag-tag bunch of artists, including a couple of San Francisco Art Institute students, in the old Primalon Roller Rink above Tree’s Pool Hall on...
Wallpaper Statement Part 1
I woke up one morning in 2002 with a ripe stream-of-consciousness Artist Statement burning in my brain, and it wanted to come out – right now. My wife sat down with me and typed the statement as I spoke it; it came out as one long monologue. I felt it would be good to...
Wallpaper Statement Part 2
Continued from Part 1: The first painting I painted, a couple of years before I had thoughts of becoming a real painter, was a bleeding half of a cantaloupe on a checkerboard tablecloth with a fork looming overhead. As Yogi Bera says, “When you come to the fork in the...
Wallpaper Statement Part 3
Continued from Part 2: In painting, I had discovered a "profession" that suited my dependencies. That is to say, if I became an artist, it was partly because it fitted my lifestyle. Life is funny that way: I haven't had a drink in 36 years, but I am still an artist....
Wallpaper Statement Part 4
Continued from Part 3: I drove east in 1962, having been invited to the Norfolk Yale School of Music and Art as a grantee. The crits I got there were incomprehensible. After a while I figured out they were analyzing my paintings in terms of Cubism, and Cubism was...
Wallpaper Statement Part 5
Continued from Part 4: It was never my intention to deconstruct art as I found it. I strove to expand the boundaries of painting, not the boundaries of what was then becoming art: gray or glass boxes, conceptual art, installation art, performance art, minimalist art,...
Gulley Jimson, John Bratby, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charlie Chan, & Wyoming Slab
If you want to be an artist and you’re in midnight quarantine, you are required to become acquainted with "Gulley Jimson" and British painter John Bratby. (That is, if you want to become a bunion on the foot of Lazarus.) I highly recommend you watch the delightful...
“Spoke” in the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Tuesday March 31, 2020 – Left of Center: Student Curators Reflect On Their Experience Reinstalling the Anderson’s Permanent Collection It was a nice surprise to find this article from 2020 about seven graduate student curators...
Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation: “Inside Light”
Inside Light, 1969 –Dodecagon Series. Fiberglass and polyester resin. Ronald Davis was one of the most significant artists to extend the accomplishments of Abstract Expressionism. His geometrically shaped paintings of the late 1960s and early ‘70s utilized new...