{"id":93139,"date":"2025-05-20T21:08:42","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T04:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=93139"},"modified":"2025-06-02T15:22:49","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T22:22:49","slug":"hadley-ramptons-journey-through-two-media-and-two-ways-of-seeing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/hadley-ramptons-journey-through-two-media-and-two-ways-of-seeing\/","title":{"rendered":"Hadley Rampton\u2019s Journey Through Two Media and Two Ways of Seeing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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t Phillips Gallery, Rampton\u2019s heavily textured oil landscapes\u2014displayed alongside Dan Toone’s metal sculpture\u2014explore illusion and flatness through palette knife gestures.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

I have friends who deny themselves the pleasures of visiting a gallery, so determined are they to avoid the wall signs that they interpret as telling them how to look at the art, how to interpret it, and how to respond. They\u2019re equally determined not to read the sort of writing 15 Bytes provides\u2014like the text you\u2019re reading here. Many of them are themselves artists: I was privileged to write a number of times about the irreplaceable Sam Wilson, who cooperated fully by opening his studio, answering my questions, and even sharing hundreds of drawings. But he never read a word of the results.<\/h4>\n

I\u2019m thinking about this because, during the opening at Phillips, Friday night, I wondered what someone who chose not to read anything about the art would make of the three collections of work on display. They would probably dig Dan Toone, who makes literally heavy metal into visible, spatial music, requiring no explanation and offering none. But what about the other two bodies of work, which appear to have nothing whatsoever in common? The large paintings invoke the presence of objects in space, primarily trees but also birds and weathered rock towers. These have been limned in oil with exclusive use of the palette knife, so in place of blended passages of shaded color we find gestures captured in solid hues, paint daubs forming textures that appeal as much to the eye\u2019s sense of touch as its response to pigment. Among the trees in particular, circles abound: petals, leaves, and what optical science calls “circles of confusion,” which are pure orbs of light that has been focused by the pinhole lenses formed in the spaces between opaque tree parts.<\/h4>\n

Spaced between these rough-hewn, deeply-tinted nature studies, in what qualifies as the Phillips exhibition style of interleaving sympathetic-but-contrasting artists, are small paintings completely unlike those around them. Meticulously drawn and detailed, then brushed in with transparent washes of pale watercolor, rather than focusing on nature, they depict human habitations: specifically life in small and colorful European towns, scenes along streets that the artist has clearly visited and come to know well enough to create these dispatches as testimony to those visits. The only thing they have in common with their companion pieces is the clear, natural light that reveals both having been painted out of doors … as well as testifying to the time of day, the weather, and the activities as well as the appearance of the inhabitants.<\/h4>\n