Monday, October 27, 2008
Who is Ralph Goings?
Ralph Ladell Goings is an American Photo-realist. He was born May 9th, 1928 in Corning, California, and is still living. He is known as one of the most skilled Photo-realists and is one of the original members of the Photo-realism art movement in the late 1960’s. As for education, Ralph Goings attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA and then accepted his B.F.A. Then he continued his art education at California State University in Sacramento, CA. He then started painted Photo-realistic images and from then on continued painting this art. He developed his style of art mostly from the past art movement which was Pop-art. He would paint pictures from magazines or other media, just like many Pop-art artists did. Eventually he took his style to another level and began taking his own pictures of commodities and then painting them. He took a lot of pictures of the California environment which includes pick up trucks, hamburger stands, and banks. Then he moved on and changed themes and started painting diners, supermarkets, fast food places anything that served food, maybe because that was popular at the time. Then once he moved to New York he changed his focused subject and started taking pictures and painting of the insides of diners, like the food, and what was going on inside of the diner. Here Ralph Goings states, "In 1963 I wanted to start painting again but I decided I wasn't going to do abstract pictures. It occurred to me that I should go as far to the opposite as I could. ... It occurred to me that projecting and tracing the photograph instead of copying it freehand would be even more shocking. To copy a photograph literally was considered a bad thing to do. It went against all of my art school training... some people were upset by what I was doing and said 'it's not art, it can't possibly be art'. That gave me encouragement in a perverse way, because I was delighted to be doing something that was really upsetting people... I was having a hell of a lot of fun..."(Ralph Goings), he states this because there was a big change in his pictures and his focused object changed at one point during his career. Whatever it was that he was painting, it generally had to do with middle-class aspects of America. He was an excellent Photo-realist and his art is still very well known all around America.
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