ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS Meyer East Gallery Ron Hicks
Ron Hicks’ works have been characterized as a blend of representational art and impressionism. Some critics have compared them to paintings by Rembrandt and Daumier. The artist translates his own moody visions with a muted palette and rarely uses pure color. He particularly favors the variety he finds in gray. “Gray allows me to capture atmosphere, mood, and layers of emotion,” he says. “Gray sets the tone for the rest of the painting.”
It’s no surprise that Ron Hicks spurns the academic approach to figure painting, which requires exactness-too stiff and boring, he says. It’s also a method that can yield models with pained expressions. His creative process involves explaining an idea for a pose to a model and then waiting for her to strike a comfortable facsimile. “The best postures are the ones that just happen; then the models stay comfortable,” he says. “I don’t want to paint a pose that is unnatural and has nothing to do with actual life.”
If one asks Hicks about his favorite subject matter he replies without hesitation, “figures and interiors.” But he quickly qualifies “figures” by saying that painting them is really about painting shapes of color. “I am a shape guy. By that I mean I see things more in terms of shape rather than the objects or people,” he says. “Everything is about shape, medium shape vs. large shape, lighter shape vs. darker shape.”
After high school, Hicks attended classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design on scholarship. He eventually moved west where he graduated from the Colorado Institute of Art and studied at the Art Students League there. Today he credits his teacher with exposing him to a new way of seeing. “A light bulb was turned on. I started seeing things in terms of shapes and edges, texture, line and color,” he says. “I no longer saw painting as a way of just transferring information; I started looking at what I wanted to say in a piece.”
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