Ronnie Landfield, In the studio; photo by Ed Watkins, August 2019

I have had a wonderful and successful career as a painter since 1965. My work is rooted in the modernist tradition of 20th-Century art.

My inspiration has been my conviction that modern painting is fueled by the combination of tradition and the realities of modern life. Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work. They are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language, and the landscape (God's earth) as a metaphor for the arena of life. The revelation of a primal image that delivers an immediate response in the viewer is my goal. Hopefully my paintings convey a felt perception of life, an awareness of the history of art, and a clear expression of my passion and sense of spirituality. I sense a visual music that externalizes what I feel within me and in the air.

As a teenager I was inspired to pursue a career as an artist. When I was about fourteen I made my first real paintings. Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Miro and especially Picasso and the Abstract Expressionists were important influences on my work. In 1961 I was inspired by a Life Magazine article on the Abstract Expressionists notably: Pollock, de Kooning, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Rothko, Still, Motherwell and Kline.

After several stints at the Art Students League, and a brief college career at the Kansas City Art Institute (1963), The San Francisco Art Institute (1964-65), and the University of California at Berkeley (1964), my professional life as a painter began in New York City during the Summer of 1965. During the summer and early fall of 1965 I rented several apartments and lofts on the Lower East Side. Finally in November 1965 I rented a loft with a friend of mine (a sculptor) in a building on Spring Street and Lower Broadway in Manhattan. A period of hardship including a devastating studio fire in February 1966 followed. I wrote a letter to the architect Philip Johnson and we had a meeting in his office in March 1966. The late Mr. Johnson was enormously encouraging and inspiring and he suggested that when I made some paintings I show them to him. I got a job in an advertising agency working as a commercial artist and I returned to painting in April 1966 by sharing a loft with another former classmate Dan Christensen at 4 Great Jones Street. The Border Painting Series was completed in July 1966, and soon after architect Philip Johnson acquired a painting: Tan Painting for the permanent collection of The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Philip Johnson became my first important patron.

Ronnie Landfield, in the studio, 94 Bowery, NYC; November 1969 photo by Melissa Shook

When I was nineteen, by the Fall of 1966, after completing a major series of hard-edge border paintings, success as a painter began to materialize. The famous architect and collector Philip Johnson and the famous collector Robert Scull each acquired large paintings of mine. The Sheldon Memorial Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska acquired a painting of mine for its permanent collection. My circle of artistic friends and colleagues continued to grow throughout this period.

During the summer of 1967 when I was twenty, I rented a studio on the Bowery where I continued painting large abstract paintings. I was invited to participate in the Whitney Annual at the end of the year. My painting The Howl of Terror, hung opposite the Larry Poons painting and Larry and I met and became friends. I had two drawings and two poems published by the Letter Edged in Black Press. My work attracted considerable attention and I was invited to participate in important group exhibitions at the Bykert, Bianchini, and Park Place Galleries in New York; and my work was included in several publications notably an Esquire Magazine article on young artists in the Robert Scull collection.

I had a series of different and interesting jobs,