Autumn Ramsey

Autumn Ramsey is an idiosyncratic artist whose paintings possess an intimate sense of revelation. Embracing traditional pictorial structure combined with personal preferences, psychological insights and poetic feeling, Ramsey's work has an intelligence that is phenomenal in its understanding of what works in a painting and in the viewer's experience of it. Her work has an uncanny sense of recognizing this as well as the point at which visual flourishes often demand something awkward or seemingly incomplete in order to find fulfillment. This balancing of different aspects of understanding, of different intelligences, defines her practice. She will at times push a figure to the edge of the canvas as if it's running out of room. Sometimes she directs the gaze elsewhere, giving the work an ethereal quality that exceeds a simple understanding and instead addresses experience in its broadest terms. Ramsey paints less from objective observation so much as she brings her imagination into play. We tend to think of dreams and the imagined as being less real and believe waking moments to be reality. Marked by self-reflection, Ramsey's work explores the complicated play between these varied recognitions of being in each of us as well as our desire to realize our nature in a way that we sense is shared but often challenges description.