Ran Ortner

When I first heard of Ran Ortner he had just won the grand prize of 250,000 dollars at the first ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 2009. I have many relatives and friends in that town who were eager to tell me about his wonderful painting of the sea, and I was curious about him. But I couldn’t see the photos of his large painting very well and he more or less slipped from my mind. But last month I received the latest issue of The Sun magazine in the mail, and in it is an interview with him, along with a couple of good photos of his work, including the one above.

Ran Ortner does very large paintings of the ocean. The image featured in the magazine is six feet tall by twenty-four feet long. His work includes no images of people, boats, or flotsam of any kind, for scale or spatial orientation. And he never includes a horizon line. All we are given is the endlessly fascinating surface of the water.  The space of these works becomes our space, pushing and pulling on us like the moon on the tides. These paintings are both contemplative and daunting, full of life and energy that requires of the viewer a stong engagment.

I encourage you all to check out his work at his website:

http://www.ranortner.com/#home/

I also encourage you, if you are not familiar with The Sun magazine, to check that out as well. Here is their website:

 http://www.thesunmagazine.org/