Leonard Ragouzeos

Big Drawings-
Leonard Ragouzeos: http://www.leonardragouzeos.com/
Hammond Gallery: Fitchburg State College

Angie @87
india ink on paper
108x60

41 years of teaching!
This man knows how to handle a shy crowd of students.

The talk was held in the gallery proper. He started with a brief history of his education and teaching history then started right in on talking about the current work in the gallery.

Introduction finished, he turned to the crowd (mostly undergrad students) and said with a smile: "Ok, I've been teaching for 41 years so, first I'm going to give you the answers to all the questions I know you are going to ask me and then I'll open it up to whatever I may have missed."
I couldn't help but chuckle as he asked himself questions: "what kind of paper are you using? . . .Yudo", "what kind of ink? . . .india ink","why work so big?" . . .to be immersed in the work visiually,"why not color?" . . . .color carries extra meaning","do you use photographs for reference?" etc . . . .
Once he opened the floor to further questions everyone was smiling and the students felt perfectly comfortable asking further questions.

His answers were longer than I recorded here but it's the visual of the artist wandering the gallery holding this pleasant question and answer session with himself that I remember most about the show:)

The work itself is amazing! The image at the top of this page was just slightly too tall to fit in the gallery but if you check out his site, the majority of his other "Big Drawings" were on display.

The paper is thick and glossy, not absorbent in the slightest. He works with a brush in one hand and a hair-dryer in the other to dry the ink before it travels too far down the wall. Thousands of strokes are built up and overlapped to create each image. Up close the drawings look completely hap-hazard and chaotic.
As you pull away from the image every random gesture and chance act of gravity on ink coalesces into an image with the vaguely translucent glow of pale skin at dusk when the daylight has faded just far enough for the color to drain yet the form remains.