Kyle Ragsdale:
Human Condition
His hazy figures stand dressed in their business suits, stepped and repeated across the canvas, staring faceless back at the observer. Patterns and symbols emerge across these nondescript fields as well -- images of power and purity, light and darkness, legion and solitude...
The oft-blurred human figures that Kyle Ragsdale incorporates into his paintings are stripped of their possible narrative/character importance (reduced and stripped of their environment, too, as the forms will usually be shown without a cast shadow), and left to fend for themselves within lonely scenes. He explains that the uniformity of the subject is enhanced by choice of media -- including wax, spray paint and stencils.
Ragsdale, a full time youth pastor and prolific painter (his work has appeared in some forty group exhibitions and nine solo shows), manages to set up a consistent symbolic vocabulary across his ouerve without preaching to his audience. (One of Kyle's gallery programs points out many of his frequently used symbols, including the raven, his decided symbol for providence, taken from Elijah's feeding during a famine.)
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click on any thumbnail to preview a detail
by kyle ragsdale
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