Ralph Goings

Art Brokerage: Park West, Ralph Goings American Artist: B. 1928. Ralph Goings paints pick-up trucks, franchised hamburger stands and California banks with the late model trucks gleaming arrogantly in the California sun. Next season they will be new only in the painting, in twenty years they will be perfect antique pickup trucks and their sentimental value will heighten. Hence the process of nostalgia. Goings proves again and again that the place or object, no matter how cold and stark, when vividly proclaimed within a short seasonal change, begets a larger meaning. It's a democratic triumph: all things become equal in both their power and vacuity. As a photo realist Goings neither glorifies or censures; but his objective rendering does often reveal the visual beauty and fascination of the pictorial subject. A hamburger stand may be one of the more typical symbols of our urban sprawl and convenience culture but, as Goings' paintings show, it may also be visually engaging precisely because of its synthetic qualities and the variety of texture, light play and reflections they afford. And it is this reflectiveness in our environment that offers us an incredibly fascinating and diverse array of visual entertainment. Goings and his fellow photo realists present us with visual truths: the object's presence is enough justification to make it a work of art. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.