PRESS

As seen in issue 50 (February 2008) of Closer Magazine, in the "NationalArt" section.

Color Field Alchemist
The constructed world of Ronald Lusk

It’s a warm, rainy Wednesday night and I’m at the studio of Ronald Lusk. His studio is reminiscent of your run of the mill commercial office space--a collection of books, portfolios of his photographs and framed works, mostly what he calls “pre-constructs,” studies in his vein of visual interest.

Lusk’s work appears to be deeply influenced by the color field paintings of artists like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko and the suprematism of Kasimir Malevich, abstract pieces with large swathes of solid color. His work is also profoundly cerebral, with a palette heavily influenced by, in Lusk’s own words, “the ideas of the medieval alchemists who, during the process of heating and cooling matter, observed and catalogued changes in color.”

He also references the depth psychology of C.G. Jung, whose theory of unconscious projection, Lusk believes, includes a recognition of color cycles as “projections of the unconscious cycles of transformation of the mind.”

Pressed to talk about his aesthetic and what has influenced it over the years, he says “Look around. Buildings. Signage. Packaging. Infrastructure. Media. The human-constructed world is my aesthetic. ‘The beauty is all around us,’ said Leger. He is correct.”

Lusk’s works are the residue of the juxtaposition of simple forms, recorded and reproduced with complex technology. He speaks of something “…mysterious that happens within the camera…” between the moment he builds the constructions and then photographs them.

Lusk never received a formal art education. “I worked in the New York City film business for a number of years as a writer and producer,” he says. “I've done a fair amount of travel journalism. I am a successful publisher and graphic artist. So I guess that the sum of those experiences have come together to support my emergence as an artist.” “I was obsessed by Middle Eastern and Asian art for about a decade after college, so I have a fairly good grounding in non-Western art history. For the last twenty years I've been a student of Jungian psychology: I'm about halfway through his collected works (Jung was an amazingly prolific writer) with some protracted detours through the writings of his circle of colleagues.”

Lusk says his greatest artistic influence has been the artist Knox Martin, best known for the ten-story tall New York City mural Venus. “[Martin] lived through and assimilated all the major art -isms of the 20th century,” Lusk says. His friendship has been a gift and an inspiration.”

Among photographers, Lusk says the work of William Klein and Harry Callahan “gave me the confidence to photograph the world according to my own personal vision. Jan Groover's tabletop work grounded me. Andreas Gursky and the rest of the Becher school are hugely influential.”

Lusk’s current show, “+Blue,” at Mulry Fine Art in West Palm Beach, is an outgrowth of his earlier show, “Colors of Transformation,” a series in white, yellow, red and black.

“These four colors were symbolic of the processes we all, as human beings, experience in our lives,” Lusk explains. “But an important part of the human experience was missing: the mysterious action that allows one to move beyond the confines of his or her human limitations…In the West, such an experience is often called grace. So a fifth color was added to my palette of materials: blue. Hence this series is called, ‘+ Blue.’”

Asked to summarize what his work is about, Lusk says, “The intersection of the aesthetic and the psychological experience, and how the human constructed world reflects and impacts them both.”

"Ronald Lusk: +BLUE"
An exhibition of large scale photographs by Ronald Lusk
MULRY FINE ART
3300 South Dixie Hwy, suite 2, West Palm Beach, FL 33405
561-228-1006, www.mulryfineart.com