Ron Gorchov

Overview

Ron Gorchov, Loggia, 1985

My paintings are mostly made from reverie, and luck.

I do like very thin, wet paint. When I was young I worked through all the different ways to paint. I used pasty paint and built it up. I fell in love with Matisse’s way of using very little paint. I liked the elegance of using thin paint. When I was really young and painting, I really didn’t have a way that I knew I could put paint down. I hadn’t figured out what I liked. I didn’t want to lean towards subjective motivation, where the brush stroke is totally subjectively motivated. I wanted to be more like a sign painter, where it was objectively motivated. In other words, I wanted to know where the paint was going. I made a decision, I thought, that’s the kind of artist I wanted to be.

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Biography

I feel like the subjective element - where you have an impulse to put the paint down and you know where it's going - that impulse, and the feeling you have when you're putting it down, gives the work life.

The late Ron Gorchov was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1930. He attended the University of Mississippi in 1947, spending the following two years at the Roosevelt College & Art Institute in Chicago and rounded up his studies at the University of Illinois in 1951.

As a groundbreaking artist, Gorchov bridged sculpture and abstract painting, developing a singular artistic vocabulary over decades of practice. He belonged to a generation of painters who removed their canvases from the rectangular stretcher seeking a new pictorial field, and within his signature curved canvases he united form and content while preserving their tensions. His hybrid...