Current Events and Announcements

I am honored to announce an upcoming exhibition of my work offered by the Dennos Museum Center at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. It will be a retrospective of fifty-five years, featuring various creative phases and subjects.
Opening in September 2023, it will run four months into December.
More to come..

IMPORTANT:Work will not be available for purchase from February 27 through May 5, 2023.

A Short Biography

Ron was born in Detroit in 1950, drew from an early age, attended Detroit’s premier magnet Cass Technical High School and the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, later known as Center for Creative Studies, during its legendary early period, studying Industrial Design, Drawing, and Painting, and worked throughout the state of Michigan as an artist and designer.He has had 28 one-man exhibits and has been in 107 group shows, including many juried shows at the Elizabeth Lane Oliver Center For the Arts and Traverse Area Arts Council, winning many awards. Ron was awarded an Honorable Mention in the First Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition, Viewers Choice Award in the Second Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition at the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, First Place in Crystal Lake Art Center Annual Juried All Media Show in Frankfort, Michigan.Ron has done commissions for private individuals, the Empire Bank, and St Joseph’s Hospital. Two of his paintings are in the Dennos Museum Permanent Collection.His work is a unique artistic vision in a contemporary style, sensitive to the effects of light expressed through color.“I grew up in the working class manufacturing cyclone of 1950's Detroit, “The high church of American capitalism” - Tom Brokaw. As a male honor student, excelling in math, who could also draw, I had the drafting/engineering/manufacturing/corporate culture pretty much handed to me, possibly forced on me. Fortunately, I eventually found a way into the rich creative culture of the time and place to explore the other, creative, personal, humanist side of life and the mind. Painting called me as a mythic vocation embodying the essential mystery and spiritual beauty of nature and the human psyche.These paintings are the result of my fifty-five year experience with the Art Spirit, pursuing the possibilities of a personal transformative vision, engaging emotion, expression, and the poetry of visual music. Prior to 1990 my art revolved around the human figure. After relocating from a major urban area to a wooded rural setting on a river, my work of 1990 through 2002 was mainly landscape.In 2002 my work focused on views of my studio and various interiors, at times combined with landscape elements balancing realism with abstraction. The series titles “Inside Out” and “Windows “became the numbered “Passage” series, as they are a passage from the exterior to the interior, in the painting, but also the sense of the creative interior of the artist and passage to future unknown creations.I feel it to be a passage from Techne to Psyche. Techne representing the logical, linear, thinking life experience. The interiors of my studio are an obvious reference to the interior creative life of the artist, as are the various female figures, all called Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul, heart, or spirit. The various still life subjects in the interiors are a symbol to me of the countless classic paintings of the past and another symbol of the artist’s life. The interior/landscape motif also is a symbol to me of the natural versus man-made worlds, inside versus outside, etc. Since 2010 my work has become even more abstracted, exploring the possibilities of the Psyche realm of experience. A compositioninspires me by the combination of colors, almost like a musical chord, as well as the larger shapes or masses and their relation. It's basically the natural world as the start of a composition. Nature is the source, but the art is Nature seen through the artist's temperament or psyche.My technique generally is to work in acrylic, then oil, with brushes and painting knives to apply veils of color. I use the infinite varieties of natural color and tone in my paintings in several ways. I vary a large area of color in a subtle gradation from side to side or top to bottom. I also layer a veil of color over another dry area or into a wet area. These colors can be sympathetic in hue or value or saturation, depending on the effect. This results in a classic, flickering oil surface. Other times I use several colors in the brush and vary the pressure just so to get unique, expressive passages. I also do a lot of scraping with the palette knife for effects and paint application. I balance realism with abstraction, using a classic oil painted surface. Technically my painting embodies the freedom of gestural abstraction with the care and considered nuance of classical realism. As I also have been a drummer for 50 years, my art is greatly influenced by instrumental creative music, originally fusion jazz and now the music beyond category on the European ECM label.Twenty years ago I met Lau Chun, the Chinese Impressionist color master in Honolulu. My color developed from what I learned from him and the masters at the Detroit Institute of Art.”“Both light and color evoking the inherent mystery and spiritual qualities of nature.” Mary McNichols Ph.D. Professor of Art History at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI.“. . . color that is reaching down and scraping the human soul” Tony Suhy, musician"The colors, lines and spaces start to listen and dance. Beautiful combinations and transitions, creates different layers of space and perspectives. The drift and spin of colors, levels and transitions create multilayer movement although it is flat. Amazing. Thank you." - Nik Bartsch, International ECM records Zen funk composer, pianist, bandleader, Zurich club owner."Rather than depict the specific, I work in a more personal, poetic manner using a harmony of forms from observed, created, and remembered sources in their own beautiful color universe. I paint with enough content that the mind and imagination are pleased and with enough literal image that the eye is also satisfied. Hopefully, my art conveys a sense of balance and beauty”.

Hot Rods - Rock and Roll - Automotive Beginnings…

I evolved aesthetically from the Detroit culture of rock and soul music, building hot rod models and custom models for the Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild. I grew up listening to my father’s large collection of big band swing music. I started playing drums at the age of thirteen in neighborhood garage bands. My dad took me to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge at the age of thirteen to hear the master drummer Gene Krupa Quartet, a powerful creative experience. Concept car design was my first artistic passion. I always had a talent for drawing, initially in the automotive realm and leading to figure drawing and beyond. I eventually read the humanism of generalist Lewis Mumford at the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts library. The school, now College For Creative Studies, is located in downtown Detroit’s cultural center, next door to the Detroit Institute of Arts, and was part of the rich cultural mix of the time. Mumford was the first of many deep thinkers I was to read. His ideas on the city, the machine, progress, power, profit, property, productivity helped me to evolve beyond the corporate automotive domain, coming to view it as an obsolete measure of personal success.

I grew up in the working class manufacturing cyclone of 1950's Detroit, “The high church of American capitalism” - Tom Brokaw.

As a male honor student, excelling in math, who could also draw, I had the drafting/engineering/manufacturing/corporate culture pretty much handed to me, possibly forced on me. Fortunately, I eventually found a way into the rich creative culture of the time and place to explore the creative, personal, humanist side of life and the mind. Painting called me as a mythic vocation embodying the essential mystery and spiritual beauty of nature and the human psyche.

My paintings are the result of my over fifty year long experience with the Art Spirit, pursuing the possibilities of a personal transformative vision, engaging emotion, expression, and the poetry of visual music.

Concept Drawings from Romancing the Automobile
Dennos Museum Center September 2007

It was a time of great optimism and excitement in the automotive world of Detroit. That world in the 1960’s was enjoying the automotive styling and engineering design renaissance created earlier by Harly Earl and other creative and passionate artists, designers, and engineers at General Motors that continued for a generation and made Detroit famous world wide for its cool, sleek, and sexy concept and production cars.

Automotive styling or car designing was the dream job of many a young man from Detroit and I was in love with all of it.

These early drawings were done when I was at Cass Technical High School in 1967-68 in the Body Styling Program and the Art School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, now the College of Creative Studies, both in Detroit, and in 1968-69 at General Motors Styling at the Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, while a co-op engineering and design student at General Motors Institute in Flint, Michigan.

While based on fantasy with impossible, exaggerated proportions, the drawings were meant to convey a fundamental design concept with great aesthetic excitement eventually leading to a production vehicle with its own personality. Whether luxury cars or small, economy vehicles, they had to be cool.

The GM studio I was in as a design apprentice was an initial concept studio. The tracing type drawings were done rapidly as a predominantly side or end view in about 30 minutes. Then another variation traced over it on a new sheet for a new drawing. Rapidly they become a style of design, as would the designs from other designers. Executives would choose designs and new drawings would develop from these. Soon there would be many drawings focused on an evolving automobile. From these small scale clay models would be started in the design studio and the process would evolve between two and three dimensions. Next came a larger scale model. At this point the project went to another studio for gradual production refinement. Contrary to popular belief, the final, meticulous pre-production design work was considered more demanding than the initial concept designing as it was closer to the final car.

The drawings on black Canson paper are Prismacolor pencil. The others on translucent layout paper are pencil alone or pastel with marker on the front and back.

I gradually moved on to the less glamorous field of automotive tooling design, (still very creative but not nearly as romantic!), and to my own painting.

Ron Gianola
Honor, Michigan 2007

The Human Figure, Realism, Music…

While attending “Arts and Crafts” in four phases over a twenty year period, 1969 through 1989, I met an incredible group of instructors in all departments. Industrial Design; architect Marco Nobili, designer and jazz royalty composer Keith Vreeland, Detroit Institute of Arts curator art historian Nicholas Snow, fine artist in egg tempera and fresco Bill Girard, master sculptor Jay Holland, ceramists Gordon Orear and Max Davis, painters without compare Richard Jerzy, Anthony Williams, Russell Keeter. They were trained in realism, some from the master Sarkis Sarkisian, and most importantly taught me to see and think.

Keith Vreeland opened the door for me to the rich world of creative jazz in Detroit, with concerts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and various downtown clubs. Life changing for me was the Strata Concert Gallery, an “underground” creative music performance space, community organization, and record label. Led by composer / pianist and Contemporary Jazz Quintet leader Kenny Cox, Strata brought in Charles Mingus, Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi, Stanley Cowell, Tribe, the original Weather Report, Elvin Jones, The Art Ensemble, Cecil Taylor, Chick Corea, etc. Strata, along with ECM, formed my musical taste and outlook to this day.
During a three year period I studied the Indian tabla drums and played with a sitar master. I was later to study contemporary jazz drumming with Detroit studio drummer Gene Stewart.

Industrial Design involved a broad training in the fine and applied arts. The incredible Syd Mead was teaching advanced rendering at this time.

I was exposed to figure drawing, art history, esthetics, and design. Transferring to Fine Arts, I spent many hours in figure drawing and painting. From this I learned to not just look but "see" in the sense so beautifully depicted by Frederick Franck in his "Zen of Seeing" books. Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" led me to the deep, life changing "The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression" by Jose Arguelles. My introduction to the split consciousness of techne and psyche from the Pleistocene to today, and it's relation to art. A huge influence on me, the twenty page bibliography kept me busy in the Detroit Main Library literally for years. Another deep influence was the writing of Joseph Campbell, relating creative work and one's life as an artist, across the ages, to the Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Figure work, my second large artistic passion, in pastels was my introduction to color. A classicist in his belief that the mission of the artist is to create beauty and to represent the inner life of the spirit, Sarkis endowed his paintings with gravity and grace. He embodied classical humanism, representing the inner life of the spirit as well as the outward form of the body, beauty, and honesty.

The Grand Landscape…and Hawaii

After realistic figurative drawing and painting, my great love and inspiration became landscape painting.

While in school I spent many hours in the magnificent Detroit Institute of Arts. I was attracted to the work of Canaletto, Brueghel, Rivera, Monet, Whistler, Jasper Cropsey, and American Impressionists, particularly George Inness and John Twachtman. George Inness was largely self-taught and had little patience for the detail and labor of drawing and engraving. He loved, instead, the richness of paint and color, which he called the soul of painting, and believed that one painted, "not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion." The Detroit Institute of Arts has some astounding Inness landscapes that always caught me. A huge influence, he showed me representational painting could be emotional, personal, and poetically evocative of an inner source.

“Alluding to subjects, avoiding mimetic representation. …detail did not gain me meaning…” – George Inness

“indirectly represent objects, directly represent or convey, atmospheric, subjective mystery of nature...not of an outer fact, but an inner life."

My large passion in 1985 for landscape work became my first subject to deeply develop in color. As I worked to find my way with expressive color, my dear wife Pam and I visited Hawaii in 1992. I met the Chinese impressionist color master Lau Chun at his gallery in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki. Due to Lau Chun’s huge influence on my approach to color in Hawaii I tried to paint like Lau for 10 years. I did not learn to paint like Lau, but much better, to paint like me.

I painted hundreds of landscapes based on the northern Michigan area around our home in Honor, near Sleeping Bear Dunes, and waterscapes of the Platte River and Lake Michigan, in a semi abstract approach. I eventually titled them in a numbered “Retreat” series.

At this point I’m working from life or observation, and beginning to merge it with memory and imagination.