Ron Shuebrook

Recent and Revisited

January 14, 2022 – February 12, 2022

“From my earliest memories, I have felt an inner need to make art of some kind, but initially I was uneasy about referring to myself as an artist. Over the course of more than five decades, during which I have been committed to the exploration of the visual arts as a way of life, I have come to accept this term, and I now understand that being an artist requires a profound engagement with a constant unfolding of possibilities.

Most of these large-scale paintings and smaller charcoal drawings were selected from a larger body of work that I’ve created since 2019. The paintings exemplify my long search for personal and collective meaning through creating rigorous, complex and resonant abstract and non-objective forms that are authentic to my own temperament, while maintaining a sense of wonder and admiration for the great art of the past and the present.”

“The two oldest paintings, Dark Spring, 2008, and Witness, 2011, are contrasting, abstract interpretations of the murders and wounding of students at Kent State University on May 4^th, 1970. These works are comprised of imagined, interrelated images, hues, processes, and structures evoking various forces and counter forces that express the horror I still feel today. The other canvases from 2021 communicate, in a similar way, the anxieties and conflicting issues that most of us have experienced over the last two unsettling years. The charcoal drawings from 2019-20, have affinities with the subjects and structures that have motivated the paintings.

I have come to perceive myself, among other things, as a fabricator of what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “thought-things.” My paintings and drawings are clearly the products of physical labour, visual judgment, and intellectual analysis, guided by my ethical aspirations. These ordered and orderly objects are intended to engage perceptions and to stimulate contemplation through evocative, yet integrated, physical and visual structures. Ultimately, I seek to make art that is simultaneously a testament to human continuity and improvisation and a site of immediate sensory experience and social meaning. I’m chasing that sense of what it is to be alive.”

Ron Shuebrook
Guelph, ON
January 7, 2022