Ron Richmond

RON RICHMOND received M.F.A. and B.F.A. degrees from Brigham Young University. He has worked as a professional artist for 20 years. He was born in Denver, Colorado and currently lives in a small town in central Utah. Artist Statement: The actual layer of paint on canvas or board is the surface, which fact can never be ignored. The mere marks, lines, brushstrokes that make up the surface are also symbols. They may, if only purely abstract and formal in presentation, still symbolize to the eye, mind, or heart ideas and mean￾ings only realized by our subconscious yearnings for archetypes. Archetypes begin as personal and reveal themselves to the collective—the individual to the common. If those marks begin to represent something recognizable, regardless of subject, they still symbolize the object, never actually becoming it. A paradox lies in the fact that no matter how exact an object is represented, it is still an illusionistic symbol of something else. A good work should encompass surface and symbol, the cognitive and the spiritual, freedom and restraint.