Paintings by Ernest Lockridge

Mythopoeia, acrylic and mixed, 11x14--$750

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Still-Life is a contradiction in terms. All things are alive. Nature is kinetic, and overflows with living designs. By mimesis and imagination the artist participates organically in this ongoing Creation.

Ernest Lockridge

THE HONEY PATCH, acrylic on canvas, 24x24--$850

"Lockridge's chosen modus, wisely, tends toward the maxim that 'less is more' . . . [This] foray into grids and pure abstraction is striking yet understated." ArtScene

"PARK OF ROSES" (below) received the PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD, 2008 SPRING ANTHEM EXHIBIT, sponsored by the Worthington Area Art League:

PARK OF ROSES, acrylic on canvas, 11x14--$800

BLUE EYES, mixed media, 11x14--$1000

Please click on link to Simon&Schuster

My painting bears witness to my belief that all things are alive within a living design that is infinite, universally evolving, and pyrotechnic. No essential difference exists between "animate" and "inanimate." Life centers the Creation; life infuses the macrocosm and the microcosm. The kaleidoscopic, buzzing subatomic world of the quanta--whether "particles," "waves," "strings," birdsong, jazz riffs and/or whatever Next New Thing emerges from the imagination of newly minted Newtons and Einsteins in the ongoing enterprise of reading the Mind of God--constitutes a universe of life, and the DNA molecule writ large, or life as we commonly experience it, is an epiphenomenon of this subatomic infinity, just as all tangible life--forests and fools and ourselves--are the macro-epiphenomena of DNA. Nor do I acknowledge much difference between "representational" and "abstract": to produce true art the human imagination both creates and perceives, seeks and interprets what it finds, when the artist engages mindfully in the dance of life. Making art is a journey of discovery, an exhilarating treasure hunt. My paintings aspire to serve as humble pieces in the Great Puzzle, and to provide a modicum of comfort and happiness.

I made my first paintings after receiving a set of Sargent oil paints in the brown corrugated cardboard box for my 8th birthday. I'm author of five books, including three novels, HARTSPRING BLOWS HIS MIND, FLYING ELBOWS and PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE (published variously by New American Library, Signet Books, Stein & Day, Pocket Books, and Book-of-the-Month Club). I'm the editor of TWENTIETH-CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GREAT GATSBY (Prentice-Hall, 20 printings over 30 years). My most recent book is the non-fiction TRAVELS WITH ERNEST co-written with my wife Professor Laurel Richardson and published in 2004 by Alta Mira Press in association with Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. I was a member of the faculties of Yale University (1963-71) and The Ohio State University (1971-91) where I am Professor Emeritus of English. Between teaching stints I spent a pleasant, productive year as a Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, writing a novel about the wild and wooly artist Prince Elmo Hatcher battling the confusion and angst (!) of his times. For decades I was a jazz musician, playing clarinet, and soprano, alto and tenor sax. Painting is more than a little like improvising on a melody.

My work has hung in numerous exhibitions. I have five solo exhibits scheduled for 2007-8.

1. "Winter Dreams," November 13, 2007--January 14, 2008, the Worthington Community Center, 345 E. Wilson Bridge Rd., Worthington, Ohio. Sponsored by The Worthington Arts Council

2. February 2008, Market Mortgage, Worthington, Ohio

3. Northwood ARTSpace presents "SPRING FORWARD," Paintings by ERNEST LOCKRIDGE, April 3-May 17, 2008. 2231 N. High St., Columbus, Ohio.****

4. *******CURRENT EXHIBIT*****"SUMMERTIME"--JUNE 9-AUGUST 31, 2008--THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY FACULTY CLUB, 181 South Oval Drive, Columbus, Ohio 43210. In Colleagues Restaurant. 614-292-2262

5. July 2008, Guernsey Bank, Worthington, Ohio

Other Exhibits:

********2008 OHIO STATE FAIR (2 Paintings), July 30-August 10********

January-February, 2008--JungHaus, 58 W. 3rd Ave., Columbus, Ohio--614 291-8050

February-March, 2008--First Community Church, Upper Arlington, Ohio

lockridge.1@osu.edu

Note: I've created a link to my "wonderful . . . tour de force" (Prof. James Phelan) "F.Scott Fitzgerald's Trompe l'Oeil and THE GREAT GATSBY's Buried Plot," JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE 17 (Spring 1987), 163-83. Though my essay--which brings forward that novel's Figure in the Carpet--has gathered increasing notice in recent years, the ding an sich remains buried where JNT lies mouldering in the gloomy, dusty stacks. martyr to the mustard gas of Theory. The essay, which takes its title from the visual arts, elucidates what Fitzgerald means when he writes that GATSBY is "a new thinking out of the idea of illusion." Tragically, it's a novel that during his lifetime "nobody understood."

CLICK HERE: "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Trompe l'Oeil and THE GREAT GATSBY's Buried Plot," ESSAY by Ernest Lockridge, published in THE JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE. Volume Seventeen, Number Two, Spring 1987, pp. 163-183.

Little Old Lady

Acrylic and mixed on canvas, 11x14--$750

Click Here: INCENDIARY INTERPRETATIONS of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ross Lockridge Jr. and others, by Ernest Locridge

CLICK HERE: Ernest's SOUTH STREET BAND--Ernest plays clarinet, and soprano, alto, and tenor saxophone.

Note also: My father Ross Lockridge Jr.s great American novel RAINTREE COUNTY--the cry of a mortally wounded spirit--has just been reissued by the Chicago Review Press. RAINTREE COUNTY was the favorite novel of Jim Morrison of THE DOORS.

http://RAINTREECOUNTY.COM

Why did my father Ross Lockridge Jr. commit suicide March 6, 1948, while RAINTREE COUNTY was America's Number One Bestseller? The two biographies of Dad--an envy-driven hatchet-job with kid gloves, and a tedious shaggy-dog story--proffer solutions worthy of Doctor Watson and Colonel Hastings; the Freudian quackery of both biographies is quintessential Sid Caesar. In TRAVELS WITH ERNEST, however, I unlock the riddle that underlies this family and personal tragedy, this incalculable loss to literature. Although I could dwell upon the grim mystery at length, "Grandson of Paleface," my act of Witness, should suffice:

Click here for "Grandson of Paleface, Sedona," from TRAVELS WITH ERNEST

ROAD WARRIOR, ICELAND, acrylic on canvas, 14x22--$2500

HOMAGE TO MATISSE, acrylic on canvas, 12x16--$850

These magnificent Icelandic ponies were jammed together in a tiny corral at the edge of Gullfoss (Golden Falls) in Iceland. My title--from the back of the t-shirt I was wearing at the time--expressed my mood at the sight of these trapped, gorgeous, noble creatures. I transposed the Gullfoss to express the black stallion's essential spirit, and the Spirit of Place. "And, speak of 'taming,'--in LOST IN ICELAND the strangely elided and juxtaposed shapes of two big horses stand flank by flank, nearly fill the canvas, and create a study in design and color that is baffling.--As I recall, a splat of midnight sun, or perhaps a day time moon--is visible here. And iconic white aurioles, sun-like splats, glimmer in other of Lockridge's paintings.--But you have to look. The aesthetics of design and abstraction are present in LOST IN ICELAND. Yet, the large truncated shapes of the two horses suggest something primitive and one cannot help but think of pre Norse myths and legends." Liz James ArtScene

LOST IN ICELAND, acrylic on canvas, 28x38--NFS

Amethyst, acrylic and mixed on canvas, 11x14--$750

Golden Falls I I, Iceland, acrylic on canvas, 20x24. $850

CONVERGENCE, acrylic on canvas, 20x24--$950

Heva

mixed media, 11x14--$750

OUT AND ABOUT, acrylic on canvas, 28x38--NFS

SAFFRON ROBE, acrylic on canvas, 24x36--NFS

click here to download HARTSPRING, Chapter Nine

"Iceland Gotterdammerung 999 C.E.," acrylic on canvas, 20x24--$950

FLOATING ISLAND, acrylic on canvas, 20x26--$800

SLEEPING BEAUTY, mixed media, 12x16--$850

KUNDRY, GOLDEN GATE PARK, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x30--$1800

This painting, MOON ROCK, provided cover art for the book, LAST WRITES, A DAYBOOK FOR A DYING FRIEND, by Laurel Richardson, published by Left Coast Press, 2007:

http://lcoastpress.com

MOON ROCK, acrylic on canvas, 24x30--$1800

Laurel

Professor Laurel Richardson: http://sociology.ohio-state.edu/lwr

BELL ROCK MIRAGE, acrylic on canvas, 18x24--$1600

click here to download a chapter from FLYING ELBOWS

"We wonder what was going on there. An afternoon exercise of the painterly arts perhaps. We see the backside of a white convertible, top down, and the contents of a jagged and narrow back yard. And long weedy grass. I think it's long and weedy! And a No Parking sign and a skinny watch dog. A mutt. The colors dance and so does the feeling of a familiar, perhaps lackadaisical moment, when we ourselves captured, in words or paint, the unvarnished and uncropped splendor of a hot afternoon." ArtScene

NO PARKING ZONE, CARMEL, acrylic on canvas, 22x30--$1800

WHITE NIGHTS provides inter-textual design for the book LAST WRITES. In the painting it's 2 a.m.:

WHITE NIGHTS, ICELAND, acrylic on canvas, 24x36--$1800

The viewer stands on Race St. and looks down Jew Lane, in the tiny village of Greeve, Tasmania. The naming of "Jew Lane" appears to be lost in the mists of time, though the proprietor of the restaurant offstage right explained, "I think maybe a Jew lived there once."
"Lockridge's [painting] is grounded in his technical aplomb and in his familiarity with work of 'greats'--ranging from Sargent to Grandma Moses to Native American pictographs to the cave paintings at Chauvet. On his artist's statement he says that he began to use his first set of Sargents (!) paints when he was eight years old. Now he uses thickly applied paint and obvious brush strokes, like the Impressionists did. He is not afraid of color. His use of it although broad, is harmonious, meticulous. The tall BURNING BUSH, TASMANIA, seems about to explode with raw color and linear shapes." ArtScene

JEW LANE, TASMANIA, acrylic on canvas, 30x36--$1850

My wife, whose father was Al Capone's attorney in the 1920's, lived as a child in this Chicago building, whilst in the building across the alley resided an entire tribe of Gypsies. Here, she and her childhood pet mutt Happy look apprehensively down at Mimi--our pet Abyssian Red--who clearly rules both sides of the alleyway, and the Universe at large:

TWO WORLDS, acrylic on canvas, 30x36 (NFS)

Tasmania. The sun is tugging up the earth like a vast green beast on the verge of flight (SOLD):

WHERE THE SUN CROSSES THE NORTHERN SKY, acrylic on canvas, 30x34 (SOLD)

click here to download a passage from PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE, and Mark Schorer's letter to the author

"And God gave Moses the rainbow sign: No more water, the fire next time." (Old Spiritual)
"A gorgeous canvas . . . painted in Georgia O Keefe country in New Mexico, and in it masterful gradations of reds, oranges, browns, form a blizzard of tree foliage that nearly covers the side of a non descript ranch house. The colors . . . are on fire, smouldering." Liz James ArtScene

THE FIRE THIS TIME, acrylic on canvas, 24x36--$1950

Pleasant flowers adorning the drawbridge to Port Arthur Penitentiary, Tasmania, now a tourist destination, which drawbridge was crossed 4/29/1996 by the lunatic who murdered 35 defenseless visitors--men, women and children--at the Port Arthur Visitor's Center. Regarding the "Tasmanian Devil"--seek and ye shall find:

TASMANIAN DEVIL, acrylic on canvas, 20x30--$1150

"Lockridge has mastered the elements of composition and color. Yet, his canvasses manage to shimmy, to emit an electric charge.--It's brush strokes in motion! This is true of TIDAL POOL, YUCATAN, in which a very small man in red trunks swims his way thru huge sheafs of white water toward the opening crevice that might suggest the birth canal. Lockridge's paintings are all somewhat abstract, yet his majority of them include elements of the representational. The swimmer in red trunks is a swimmer in red trunks!"

TIDAL POOL, THE YUCATAN, acrylic on canvas, 24x38 (NFS)

BIRD'S-EYE VIEW, acrylic on canvas, 24x30 (SOLD)

I imitate the myriad Sedona petroglyphs on stone wafers and anneal them to plywood on which I've painted Sedona's red-rock buttes.

SEDONA PETROGLYPHS, mixed media, 21x24 (SOLD)

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The title represents both the "logic" of the graffitti on the concrete apron leading to the little polluted pond, and the underlying logic of the universe from which this image emerges. "The glory that moves everything penetrates the universe, and shines in one part more and in another less." Paradiso:

GOD LOVES TRIGGER, acrylic on canvas, 16x20--$900