Ronald Davis

Ronald Davis

            Ronald Davis is an artist from America who works with abstraction in his paintings.  The subjects of Davis’s paintings are geometric shapes painted with solid colors and have hard edges.  Ronald Davis also has worked with shaped canvas, in which the physical canvas is altered and “shaped” to create a new canvas.  Often these shaped canvases function as both paintings and sculptures.  These abstract paintings eventually led to Davis creating geometric art with the aid of a computer.  He also experimented with the appearance of wax on wood in his “Wax Series”. 

            I found it very interesting to read Ronald Davis’s artist statements, and I learned that he never intended to be an artist, and that he had actually had other plans for his life.  I was also inspired that he thinks the word “artist” does not hold much meaning anymore, and he suggests that the Greek word “artisan” is a better fit for the work that he does.  I was also very interested that he admits he does not know what his paintings mean, but he still enjoys the process of making them.  I like the abstract paintings that Ronald Davis creates, and I also like the idea of the altered canvas.