Vertrounds Print

Phil Ralston is an artist who lives in Atlanta. Born in Pomona, California in 1953, he grew up feeling a strong preoccupation with artistic and creative things - with music especially. He learned to play guitar and piano during adolescence and young adulthood, but to this day he's never considered his performing abilities as anything greater than a source of personal gratification, for the most part. His feelings and thoughts about some of his favorite music, however, go a long way toward informing and shaping the development of what he has allowed himself to take rather seriously - abstract drawing.  As a young man, he felt an admiration for artists who faithfully and adeptly portrayed the world around us, and showed some ability himself in the areas of still life, landscape, portraiture, and other realistic depiction. He also became interested in many of the movements within twentieth century modern art, and had no trouble embracing the, for some, challenging aspects of abstract expressionism, for example. While he has long felt that his ability as a pictorial depicter of our world is something he would truly love to develop, there has been, for many years now, a rather stronger focus on the challenges of abstractionism. His drawings are improvisations, but they show an exacting deliberation in their execution. There are no preliminary sketches. Each mark on the surface is decided upon with the appearance of the drawing, up to that point, as the main consideration for what happens next. Phil is hopeful that these careful decisions regarding composition (line, form, lyricism, conflict and resolution, the occasional quirky human detail) can coalesce, becoming a complete image somehow recognizable by other people. One observer has written: “Each work is contained within itself as a fully realized thought, but a thought that the rest of us haven’t had yet.” The work has been represented primarily at Mason Fine Art in Atlanta, and individual pieces have been added to private collections across the United States. A substantial grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2008 allowed Phil to take time off from his full-time bartending position and greatly enhance his body of work. It also facilitated a visit to New York, where Phil showed examples of the drawings to the eminent gallerist Ivan Karp, who subsequently mounted a solo exhibition at the historic OK Harris gallery in 2011.