Love Child Pomegranate and Witch Hazel, 2015

Debra Ramsay  

Debra Ramsay is an American abstract artist who does acrylic paintings, drawings and installations which explore the conceptual interaction of colors, lines and surfaces. She lives and works in New York. Ramsay graduated from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1984 and then obtained a Barchelors Degree from the Brooklyn College in 1986. She also studied at the Oregon State University in Corvallis, where she graduated in 1999. She was offered several residencies at the Albers Foundation, at the Golden Family Foundation, in New York, and at the BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy.

Ramsay's technique started with an idea. From there, she chose the appropiate support and method to give life to her concept. A big part of her work is painted with acrylics on polyester film, paper or cardboard.

Ramsay's work has a systematic and mathematical approach strongly influenced by color. She interacts with nature, recording the changing colors of the elements of the natural environment, such as landscapes, fruits, leaves and trees. She often comes back to the same precise place during different periods of the year, to see how the colors changed over time. Back in her studio, she enters the colors that she observed in a digital program that analyses them and uses these analyzes to combine the paint. The resulting work presents an abstraction of spaces and specific objects in time, determined by mathematics and explored by geometry and colors.

Ramsay' work is influenced by nature, seasons, changing landscapes and the passage of time. She gets inspired by systems, mathematics and geometry, and engages in the application of these fields of thought to the abstract interpretation of color, space and time. Her work is strongly influenced by a quote of American abstract artist, born in Germany, Josef Albers: " There is deep harmony in the immeasurable spectrum of color".

In February 2015, Carl Belz of the art blog "Left Bank" wrote about Debra Ramsay:
"Her vertical clusters and horizontal stacks resemble the colorfield paintings of the 60s by Gene Davis and Kenneth Noland. Debra Ramsay has mentioned her... interest in creating an art "without ego"... A radical ambition of a period when individual emancipation and expression are encouraged in our culture... Against such excesses, Debra Ramsay stands like an alternative note describing herself as a meditation agency, "one conducted by the arrangement of shapes and the positioning of colors..."

Ramsay's work has been widely exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as in Italy, Thailand and Germany. She has been the subject of numerous articles and interviews for the press.
Ramsay's works are part of numerous private, institutional and corporate collections, such that at the Golden Foundation in New Berlin, in the state of New York, that at the Queens Hospital Center, at the New York Memorial Museum of September 11 and at the Ritz Carlton in Dubai.