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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
"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:
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.
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.
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD "Grandson of Paleface, Sedona," from TRAVELS WITH ERNEST 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.
Your ms. lays out the central pattern of the relationship between RFL Jr. and Sr.,
but without sufficient weight or emphasis. Its figure-in-the-carpet lies in the struggle that persisted throughout
Dad's life to create an identity separate from the man whose name he bore and who tried from childhood on to obliterate
him--making Dad his amanuesis, his ghost-writer, all-round employee, Junior, the One Chosen to take over and thus be
ultimately subsumed by Senior's life. RFL Sr. relentlessly dogged Dad to subordinate himself to those endless "projects."
Note well that Dad objected strenuously to the British edition of Raintree County's appearing without the "Jr."
RFL Sr. felt and acted as though he OWNED his namesake, and Dad had this [indentured servitude] to struggle against.
It's in your narrative, but buried--or off to one side, in the shadows. At times it seems that you exert your
greatest ingenuity in trying to dismiss any serious Dark Side to this father-son dance of wills (to de-Leggett your story?
to douse in advance any possible ember of what you know I think?). However ineffectual and diminished the Father may
be as a person, he remains in some living part of the Son's mind a GIANT. It requires no sexual dimension to understand
how, in the end, giving himself over to the "smotherer" might contribute to the feelings of entrapment, powerlessness,
worthlessness, and loss of self that lie at the base of Dad's suicidal depression. Ernest Lockridge
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
 click here to download HARTSPRING, Chapter Nine Iceland's Lawspeaker proclaims Christianity the Official Religion of Iceland by casting his Norse idols over God's Falls (Gottfoss), stamped in the earth by Wotan's steed. But over a millennium later the Christian churches of Iceland are empty except for weddings, baptisms, funerals. 21st century Icelanders believe in elves, fairies, witches, even the Norse Deities once presumed crushed beneath God's Falls. Icelandic men hold Clint Eastwood in an exteem that mimics idolatry. I don't mean my painting to attack Christianity--as fine a portal as any into the Mystery--but to embody the visceral horror and helplessness of being torn from your faith.
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:
Professor Laurel Richardson: http://sociology.ohio-state.edu/lwr
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
WHITE NIGHTS provides inter-textual design for the book LAST WRITES. In the painting it's 2 a.m.:
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
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:
Tasmania. The sun is tugging up the earth like a vast green beast on the verge of flight (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
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:
I imitate the myriad Sedona petroglyphs on stone wafers and anneal them to plywood on which I've painted Sedona's red-rock
buttes.
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:
The DROWNING POOL in Iceland's valley of Thingvellir, where the Althingi dispatched women condemned for Witchcraft--fornication, back-talking, unruliness, insubordination, spinsterhood, adultery--to be drowned. A land-based site nearby was reserved for the hanging, burning and beheading of criminals convicted of civil crimes. Iceland no longer drowns its Witches. Nor do we.
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