RALPH ROSENBORG - Quotes describing The American Artist
"I would describe my painting as a highly personal and creative effort to interpret nature and the American landscape and its people"
Ralph Mozart Rosenborg, Who's Who in America
"Impressions coming into my being like a sponge. I can paint here. I can remember, look and absorb, Store them in your head. . .simple for me. My talent can live out at any time. Remembering. . .go out on the balcony, turn to paint so you paint. Absorb, learn, come home and paint recording privately."
Ralph Mozart Rosenborg, American Experimental Painter
"At fourteen or fifteen I wanted to be a musician, a violinist in an orchestra and be a conductor and composer. I transferred my desire to compose. . .now I compose in paint. I have painted in 44 states. I never repeat a picture. I never change my style. I am not a fashionable painter, Thank God. I like clothes are that are made to wear. My favorite artists are El Greco, Rembrandt and Ryder, Winslow Homer, Turner, Blake. I know I will go on painting and I will die with a tube in my mouth painting. I am an artist. I work in paint. There is an inner need, a structure of life, a need to travel. You can't fake it.
Ralph Mozart Rosenborg, interviewed by Colette Roberts for the "Meet the Artist" series at New York University, April 18, 1968
In a city of dizzying artistic gyrations, Rosenborg moves at his own tempo. Now in his 75th year he says, 'To create new images that are pure and good, you need 250 years, most of which should be spent in contemplation. Then you can create a householder on the planet.' Although he is asking for considerably more than 110 years which Hokusai thought would be necessary in order for every line and dot he drew to be imbued with life, Rosenborg has come close to that kind of grace in the time allotted him."
Martica Swain, Catalogue, "Ralph Rosenborg - Watercolors 1940-1988 Princeton Gallery of Fine Art, Exhibition Space at 112 Green Street, NYC
"If Willem deKooning can be an Abstract Expressionist master of the human figure, it would seem a not immoderate proposal to ponder Ralph Rosenborg as an Abstract Expressionist master of nature. The restrained sizes of Rosenborg's little landscapes can entice viewers, lure them in close, the better to suddenly release upon them those unexpectedly powerful gestures, those startling, heads-up color harmonies. In their breath of vision and emotion, they represent - to use a favored Rosenborg title - an 'American Landscape,' a topography rich in its natural complexity and ripe for exploration and rediscovery."
Jeffrey Weihsler, Assistant Director, Jane Voohees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University (February, 1991)
"Ralph Rosenborg began painting gestural abstractions a number of years before many well-known Abstract Expressionists. Like Seliger's his gestural abstractions are incisive perceptions of nature, balancing active and contemplative moods; expressiveness is tempered with a meditative approach to the subject. For Rosenborg, each painting stirs up memories and recalls a common human experience. He notes, 'If you go deep down the painting will give the viewer a lift. A picture has no value but for what it does for a person inside themselves.' To reach that deep experience of nature, the painted elements must be 'composites of the world we know, everything that has been stored up since childhood."
Jeffery Weihsler in Whitney Museum Catalogue, "Abstract Expressionism: Other Dimensions" (December, 1990)
