Gustavo Ramos | Illuminated Forms

Gustavo Ramos looks to the old masters to draw inspiration for his contemporary portraits

By John A. Parks

The light falls softly in Gustavo Ramos’ paintings, enveloping forms with exquisite clarity and casting airy shadows in quiet rooms. His subjects are timeless, and the compositions are thoughtfully considered combinations of shapes that endow the scenes with a classical balance and repose.

The paint handling, with its luminous glazes, subtle colors, and delicate modeling, belongs more to the world of the old masters like Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt than the rough-and-tumble of contemporary life. Given the rich qualities in Ramos’ paintings, it’s no surprise that the artist is a keen student of art history and views his work in a lively and dynamic relationship with the artists of previous centuries.

“When I was about 10 years old, I came across a Michelangelo drawing in a magazine that really stuck with me,” Ramos recalls. “It was a study for one of the figures in the Sistine Chapel. Looking back, it’s interesting to think how that sketch stood out to a boy who was mainly interested in drawing cartoons. I visited Italy a couple of years ago and standing inside the Sistine Chapel felt like coming full circle. Looking at Michelangelo has a way of putting me in my place and raising my own standards—not only in art, but in life in general.”

We might readily imagine that Ramos is the product of some storied European academy but, in fact, he grew up in modest circumstances in Brazil before coming to the United States as a teenager. Curiously, it was the experience of arriving in a new country that precipitated his interest in portraiture. “When I first moved to the U.S., I didn’t speak any English,” Ramos says, “so I had to pay close attention to people’s expressions and body language as I tried to communicate. As a result, I became interested in drawing and painting faces and exploring their psychological nuances.”

Encouraged by a high school art teacher who noticed his passion for drawing, Ramos began to build his skills and eventually went on to study art at Southern Virginia University. “The school’s art curriculum wasn’t really designed for students who wanted to focus specifically on the craft of representational drawing and painting,” Ramos recalls, “but I had a supportive professor who helped me create my own curriculum, which consisted of copying old masters’ paintings alongside drawing and painting from life at least four hours every day.”

Ramos augmented this experience with trips to major museums to look at old masters’ paintings in person and soon began to familiarize himself with the variety of techniques and approaches to painting the figure that he found in their works. After college, the artist landed in Utah, where he furthered his studies by copying 19th-century paintings in a local art dealer’s gallery.

Ramos’ work has since been exhibited regularly throughout the Southwest and has appeared at several world-class venues, including the European Museum of Modern Art in Barcelona, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Sotheby’s in New York City. The Phoenix, AZ-based artist’s work has garnered many awards and recognition, including the Select 50 in the Portrait Society of America International Competition.

When he’s not undertaking portrait commissions, Ramos often focuses on figural compositions featuring his wife. “I choose my subjects similarly to how I choose what kind of music I listen to,” he says. “If it sparks my interest and is emotionally stimulating, then I need to investigate it further. That’s partly why many of my recent paintings are depictions of my wife. Searching for what it was that sparked my love for her can sometimes yield a more universal theme in my work.”

After choosing his subject and considering some ideas for the composition, Ramos begins work on a panel. “I usually start a painting by translating my subject into a simplified pencil sketch directly on the panel,” he says. Once Ramos has achieved a general but accurate sketch, he begins to apply the first layer of paint. “I treat this stage similarly to the way I used to treat writing a first draft of an essay when I was in college,” he says. “I’m not sloppy or careless, but covering everything up in one go allows me to see how each individual part relates to the whole.”

The next pass builds on and adjusts the rough first one. “It’s done with the aim of refining the form and likeness and calibrating the tones and transitions to exactly what I want,” says Ramos. “I repeat this process until the painting not only looks real, but feels real and, hopefully, carries emotional weight.”

As he adds the finishing layers, Ramos keeps his paint somewhat transparent, particularly in the shadows—an approach that allows for depth and richness of color in the darks. Although he spends considerable time concentrating on the nuances of the color, the artist doesn’t have a stringently controlled approach for managing his palette.

“The color mixing that takes place on my palette is quite chaotic,” he admits, “but what helps me with my close control of color and tone is painting with many layers. For some paintings, all it takes is two to three layers. Other paintings can have as many as 10 layers on some passages.

“Old masters like Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt knew not to assume they could ‘get it right’ with just one layer of paint,” Ramos continues, “so it would be disrespectful to them for me to assume that I can. Another advantage of painting in layers is that there are so many different effects that arise from the paint build-up that are impossible to achieve with a single layer. These effects help transform the painting into something deeper and more lifelike.”

One of the defining features of Ramos’ paintings is the way in which the artist varies the hardness and softness of edges to reinforce the sense of form. In GLIMMER, for instance, the edge of the subject’s face has harder edges at the left cheekbone and chin and softer edges in the more fleshy sections. “Working the edges is one of my favorite parts of the process,” says Ramos. “I leave the edges until the end, because sometimes I realize my drawing isn’t quite right, and I might have to make an adjustment. I make the edges sharp where there’s the feeling of the skin being tighter.”

Softening edges can also serve to take away emphasis on an area. The clothing at the bottom of GLIMMER has soft edges and low contrast so that it doesn’t detract from the focus on the head and hands. “I generally soften the edges of elements that are close to the edge of the painting,” says the artist.

Ramos has discovered another property of edges: They can sometimes have a halo of light as if they’re brightly illuminated. “The subject’s hand in GLIMMER bounces a lot of light, so I lightened the color around the edge to make it feel as though light is being emitted from the flesh,” Ramos says. He notes that he doesn’t see this halo effect in his reference. “Even if you look directly at it, it just looks sharp,” he says. He has discovered, however, that adding the halo reinforces the sense of light.

As an artist who works considerably on successive layers of a painting, Ramos faces a particularly difficult task in determining when a work is finished. “Painting is like a conversation,” he says. “No matter how certain I am of how I think things will go, the painting seems to have its own ideas. This is especially true in the finishing stages of the work.

“For a commissioned portrait, I know the painting is finished when my clients are perfectly happy with it,” Ramos says. “For a personal or a gallery painting, it can be much more difficult to determine. It takes a lot of looking and thinking and, in the end, it usually feels more like an act of letting go.”

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www.gustavoramos.art

This story appeared in the February/March 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.