Loner, c. early 1980s

Casein and modeling paste on plywood, 60 1/4 x 37 1/4" (153.03 X 94.61 cm.)

The title of Ralph Humphrey's construction is in certain ways inapt. Although named Loner, the work establishes a direct, undisguised, and compelling relationship with its observers. Its wistfully contemplative colors-dour but sybaritic purples, blues, lavenders, muffled reds, browns, dunnish grays, and darkling isabelline yellows-invoke the captivating reminiscences of a personal journey made through metaphysical landscapes, of a companionable kinship forged with the ethers of the sky and the evanescences of the sea. Its tectonic structure, enunciated assertively with a protrusive frame, suggests a habitation fashioned expressly for individual experiences of inner and outer worlds.
Loner is as digressive as it is focused, as enigmatic as it is lyrical, and as elusive as it is immediate. Its pictorial paradoxes dissemble what they pretend to reveal, its aesthetic contradictions obscure what they claim to clarify, and its philosophical ironies inhibit what they presume to liberate. This is accomplished through the shifting formal devices used by the artist. While the alluring polychromatic palette romances through its seductive and cajoling colors, its structure, informed by a stark frontality, an austere geometry and an authoritarian frame, defiantly countervails the complaisance of the colors and the lusty impasto surfaces. One appeals to the imprecision of mood and the other to the exactitude of reason. However, Humphrey knew that such antitheses exist only in the mind for taxonomical purposes. In reality, they are one, coextensive in a world of equipoise. Thus, opposites are conciliated in a seamless entity where rigor does not gainsay reverie but complements it, where the rational and irrational, the intuitive and the verifiable are all part of the same cosmic membrane.
The work abounds in other complementary contrasts. The ragged and threadbare edges of the casein and modeling paste at the sides of the work blend into the stringent construction of the plywood beneath it. The atmospheric tonal strategies of the front of the work flow into the irregular brushstrokes on the jambs. Loner is at times insistent on its literalness as an object of art and at other times suggestive of its use as a threshold of metaphorical interpretations. Are we meant to see it as a hybrid of the architectural, sculptural, and painterly or as a gate or window that projects us onto a transilient other world? Are we meant to see it as a statement about the formalities of the minimal at one with the romantic or as a psychological see-saw of the physical and metaphysical, the real and illusory, the tangible and transcendental? Its spaces, viewed from the front, are absolute and intransigent; seen from the sides, they are relative and comparative as they transmute into changing configurations. The fixed and the ephemeral are converses of each other. And, there is as well the lingering thought that it all might be a mordant spoof on those who would reach beyond empirical realities for empyreal meanings. Recognition of the visual data could be the raison d'etre of the piece.
Ralph Humphrey's artistic achievement was considerable and would have reached a loftier magnitude had he not died at the early age of fifty-eight. His unflinching adherence to his own vision made him a devotee of no artistic currency but his own. Although some have adduced aesthetic affinities to Minimalism and Pop Art, filtered through a romantic sensibility, it is a thankless pursuit to find art works that have the inimitably distinctive look of this artist's. Created in the early 1980s, Loner is a mature embodiment of the "frame paintings" the artist had begun many years before, a developed refinement of the essences of those works that mark one of his significant contributions. Had he created only Loner in his lifetime, it would have been a consummate homage to a singular spirit.

DAVID L. SHIREY