Reviews & Awards
Reviews (excerpts)
“The first thing that strikes one about Ronald Katz’s work is how many different subjects he tackles. The second, even more important realization, is that, whether he is painting figures, portraits, still life, landscapes, animal subjects, or interiors, Katz imbues each subject with its own individual integrity, refusing to distort or simplify it for the sake of a false stylistic consistency. Yet, at the same time, there is an underlying quality to Katz’s work that makes his vision cohere from canvas to canvas, despite his wide range of subjects.”
“…Ronald Katz keeps the faith of easel painting day after day, year after year, and that faith is inherent in the title of his show as well, for he is a painter of “revisions and variations” in a very real sense: constantly reworking his canvases to fulfill some private existential need to achieve a perfection which may finally be ungraspable, but the striving for which nonetheless motivates him to ever more complex challenges.”
“The paintings of Ronald Katz, an avowed realist conversant with the entire modernist tradition and determined to preserve the place of straightforward oil painting in it, brings us back to the insular world of the studio, where all that is truly enduring begins.”
Ed McCormack – “Artspeak”
“But there is more to discover and enjoy in the works of Ronald Katz beyond the subject matter itself, particularly his skilled combination of painterly brushwork and very sensuous, luminous color that give the paintings their underlying stylistic consistency, pictorial strength and most important the intended emotional response in the viewer. It becomes quickly obvious that Katz is intimately familiar with European and American art and he sometimes reflects this fact through direct references in his subject matter. More frequently, however, the links with art historical tradition are less direct and more subtle, for Katz has rethought and reconstituted those links within the syntax of his own visual language.
Perhaps one of the strongest clues to the uniqueness of the personality of his work is an inherent nostalgia, which goes all the way back to Katz’s childhood in South Africa, where he was born and spent his first nine years.”
Irving Finkelstein, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Art History
Georgia State University