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RON ISAACS

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ron Isaacs was born in Cincinnati, seven weeks before Pearl Harbor, an only child. He never wanted to be anything but an artist. His parents were from rural Jackson County in Eastern Kentucky, and they moved back there when he was twelve to farm, build a house, and teach. After high school with no art instruction available, he majored in art at Berea College in Kentucky, won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and received an MFA in painting from Indiana University. He retired from thirty-six years of teaching painting and drawing at the college level and is currently Professor Emeritus, Eastern Kentucky University. He has exhibited nationally for over a half-century, and is represented in numerous museum, institutional, business, and private collections. He now lives in Lexington, Kentucky in a town house with his supportive art educator wife Judy, and commutes to work upstairs to his workshop and studio. In reasonably good health and having never heard of a retired artist, he can hardly wait to see what he makes next.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“The harder I look at a thing, the more mysterious it becomes.” - Claes Oldenburg My works stand exactly halfway between painting and sculpture. They take the form of relief constructions fabricated completely of Finnish and Baltic birch plywood, painted in acrylics. I use trompe l’oeil (‘fool the eye’) devices to provide the visual authority of direct observation, and I enjoy the fusion and confusion of real and illusory forms that results. A strong image and a well-designed composition are my first goals, and to make what will become a truly interesting object which rewards scrutiny and thought. Paradoxical interruptions and metamorphoses often occur. Clothing, found objects, and plant materials are my vocabulary of subject matter: The depicted vintage garments bear their own stories, and are clearly anthropomorphic stand-ins for the human figure. There are occasional found objects wearing some patina of time. Leaves and sticks form partnerships with the clothing and other subjects, often suggesting metaphors for the nature that we are part of and apart from, for memory and mortality and the passage of time, and for psychological states. I intend to make images which are as open in content and as evocative as I can devise. Creating and exploring mysteries and performing feats of magic have always been part of art’s job description. In life I will stand with science every time, but my work still likes to go out and play with the magic and the mystery.