Ron Marsden Drawings

Opportunity Influence and Discernment

Or more than four decades, I have sought to make consciously informed paintings, drawings, and wall constructions that have been rigorous, complex, and resonant in visual and material terms. As well, it has been crucial to me to pursue directions and issues that seemed authentic to my own particular temperament, curiosities and capacities while maintaining a sense of wonder and admiration in relation to the great art of the past and present that I have encountered. Having now produced thousands of works, I have come to recognize in my sustained practices that I have had no desire to have my own art replace the accomplished art of others. Rather I have been more interested in building my own critical contributions on an intellectual and psychological foundation of historical art and pictorial knowledge and understanding. Over these many years, my studio practices have increasingly acknowledged, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, historical precedents and cultural continuities, while investigating perceptual experiences and expressive circumstances that engage the urgent present. Although aspiring to be an artist of ambition and substance has been at the core of my personal goals, my essential sense of social responsibility has, in fact, compelled me as well to participate actively in the development of necessary cultural, educational, and social infrastructures whenever useful opportunities presented themselves. Furthermore, these simultaneous efforts as an educator, administrator, and writer have been deeply informed by my intense commitment to serious art making as a profession and a life’s calling of aesthetic and ethical consequence. In doing so, I came to realize that I cared little about material success, but rather hoped to serve my diverse communities in meaningful ways. Nevertheless, I have also recognized that worthy insights in the studio demanded a particular kind of courage, focus and discipline if I was to develop a convincing body of art that truly embodied a sense of human continuity, insight, and perceptual immediacy worthy of prolonged contemplation. Painting has come to serve me as an essential metaphor for the negotiation between the individual and the collective, between the intellect and the hand, between emotion and analysis, and between the past and the present. I long ago realized that my unconscious need to make art would have to be integrated into a more comprehensive and explicit understanding of the origins, possibilities, and responsibilities of art making and its diverse histories if I was to make a serious contribution as a practitioner. I have immersed myself deeply in the great western traditions of painting that have set the highest standards of aesthetic accomplishment, and have provided, for me, the most profound paradigms for visual expression and communication.