Ron Pokrasso
Below: Pokrasso, Fence Sitter, monotype, drawing, collage on paper mounted to wood, acrylic, 26 x 36"
museums, elementary schools, and lots of workshops—abroad and at his Arroyo Hondo space, which can accommodate nearly a dozen people. “I had to say something about my mom dying [in 2009], my oldest son getting married, a friend who died, my new dog. My work tends to be very close to my day-to-day activities. I’m not trying to do any great philosophical work. Just work that’s close to me.” Close to him and up to his requisite three Cs: craft, content, and composition. “Composition starts it,” he says. “Because I don’t try to make pictures about things. The content-based elements are always, always, always chosen to fit the composition.” As dominant as composition is, though, and as adamant as Pokrasso is in giving it overall precedence, there’s the impression that his process is as intuitive as it is cerebral. That as much as he struggles over what should go, what should stay in each work (he is, as he points out, a Libra, “So I’m doing this all the time,” he says, holding his hands out palms up and moving them up and down, “going back and forth, weighing everything”), he feels his way through a piece as much as he thinks it through. “Art shouldn’t look so well thought out, nor should its completion be more important than the joy of making it,” says Pokrasso, who has the distinct advantage—in the world of reverse images—of being able to write upside-down and backwards with no trouble at all. “The whole idea is to stay in the process. When I finish it’s a bummer. Anticipation of the next line, the next mark is the passion.” He pauses and looks around his studio. At the works that have been described by some New York dealers as “urban” and “edgy.” Words whose irony isn’t lost on this onetime throughand-through New Yorker who loves Santa Fe and is here to stay but who knows that as culturally exciting as it is here, “it ain’t the city.” But Pokrasso’s come to terms with all that. “I’m just following what works for me and that’s what I do,” he says. “I rarely say, I’m an artist. I say, I make art. It’s about the verb, not the noun.” Info: Zane Bennett Contemporary Art/zanebennettgallery.com
june/july 2011
santa fean
63