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Artist: Davis, Ronald 1 of 1
 
Wyoming Slab

Wyoming Slab, 1974

Ronald Davis
American, 1937-
Vinyl-acrylic copolymer and dry pigment on canvas
108 x 174 in. (274.3 x 442 cm)
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon
M.1979.44.P
© 2008 Ronald Davis

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Born in Santa Monica but raised in Wyoming, Ronald Davis returned to Los Angeles in 1965 after attending school at the San Francisco Art Institute. Immediately he began to employ the experimental materials that many of his colleagues were using, such as resin, fiberglass and lacquer. Instead of using them to harness the atmospheric effects of Southern California, however, Davis played with modern ideas of representation. In Wyoming Slab, the first of his “Snap Line” series and a return to canvas from fiberglass, the artist uses snap-line chalk over a geometric field of dry pigment to address three-dimensional illusionism on a two-dimensional surface. The artist once mentioned that the work was a self-portrait of sorts; when he arrived at art school in San Francisco he was a Wyoming “Square,” as he put it, largely unprepared for the progressive atmosphere in which he was about to be immersed.

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Artist: Davis, Ronald 1 of 1