One Year, Yellow Trail, Landscape As Time

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This project, began in April 2013 is about time-keeping.
Debra Ramsay captured time passing by documenting the change in color within the landscape at the same location (New Berlin, NY) over the course of a year. The artist thinks of each painting as a landscape; a pure landscape, reduced to the actual found colors, transposing a specific landscape to a new location, in an abstract form.
For this project, she returned to a specific trail in the forest during spring, summer, fall, and winter. Each time, taking a photo every 100 steps. 18 photos were taken on each walk.
Once back in the studio, Ramsay would mix colors with the aide of a program that interprets the color selected from a photo into a paint formula.
The viewer will see each season as an individual painting and the entire year as another painting.
While working on this project the artist is reminded of Josef Albers' statement: "There is a profound harmony in the immeasurable spectrum of color."
Debra Ramsay is an American abstract artist who creates acrylic paintings, drawings and installations that explore the conceptual interplay between color, line and surface. She lives and works in New York City.
Ramsay’s technique begins with an idea. From there she chooses the appropriate medium and method with which to realize her concept. Much of her work is painted with acrylic paint applied to polyester film, paper or museum board.
Ramsay’s process engages a systematic, mathematical approach heavily influenced by color.
She interacts with nature, documents the shifting colors of elements of the natural environment, such as landscapes, fruit, leaves and trees. Often, she returns to the same exact spot at different periods throughout the year, documenting the shifting colors over time.
Back in the studio, she then feeds the colors she documents into a computer program, analyzing them and using the analyses to mix paint.
The resulting work presents an abstraction of specific spaces or objects in time, informed by mathematics and explored through geometry and color.
Ramsay’s work is informed by nature, the seasons, changing landscapes and the passing of time. She is inspired by systems, mathematics and geometry, and engaged in the practice of applying those fields of thought to the abstract interpretation of color, space and time. Her work is heavily influenced by a quote from the German-born, American abstract artist Josef Albers: “There is a profound harmony in the immeasurable spectrum of color.