(Artwork by Linda Ramsey)
If Linda Ramsay lined up all the paintings she has ever made, they would stretch the entire length of Long Beach Island.
OK, we made that up. (Did we, though?)
The High Bar Harbor resident and Rutgers alumna has been a full-time professional artist for nearly 40 years and has captured, with oil paint in her impressionistic style, every aspect of beach living many times over. A robust schedule of art shows and gallery events keeps her moving and motivated; this year she has 12 engagements between May and December, including all the major events on LBI as well as Avalon, Manasquan and Bay Head.
As Willow Graphics, she started in the 1990s doing hand-illustrated birth records and family trees, watercolor on parchment paper, complete with impeccable calligraphy. But the work for which she is widely known in the LBI region consists of her world’s most familiar and comforting sights and experiences: sweeping marshland and bay views, beach cruisers, underwater swimmers, “beach action,” clams and oysters, mooring balls and boats.
Ramsay’s work has been sold at the Wildflowers Too gallery in Barnegat Light since it first opened, over 15 years ago. This month from July 3 through 17, she is the gallery’s featured artist, with a reception scheduled for Sunday, July 12 from 2 to 4 p.m. For the special two-week run, Ramsay will add to six or eight more paintings, on easels, and swap out some of the six pieces already on the walls, for a balanced variety.
HONEST WORK: Linda Ramsay paints, on average, six to seven hours a day in her studio when she’s not packing and traveling for summer shows. (Photo by Ryan Morrill)
In her loft studio last week at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies, where Ramsay has been the artist-in-residence for eight years and where she’ll be teaching a “Landscape Paintings of Waterlilies” class on Thursday, July 30, a newly finished bicycle painting sat on her easel, ready for LBIF’s upcoming “Coast” exhibition. She will also participate in the upcoming LBI Artist Studio and Gallery Tour, which she was involved in starting, with such stalwarts as Mary Tantillo of SwellColors Glass Studio and Matt Burton of the now-closed m.t. burton gallery.
The LBIF loft is where she keeps her tools and materials, as well as her art portfolios, organized in fat binders carefully labeled and dated; it’s also where she shares workspace with fellow painter Lori Bonnani.
“People seem to recognize my style, even though I do a lot of different images,” Ramsay said. “That’s really what I want. Even my crabs or my swimmers. Maybe it’s my colors? Maybe it’s my palette that I use?”
The sedges and channel behind her house were her early subject matter when she was painting from her deck and garage.
“That was my whole view,” she said.
She soon found beach cruisers to be a challenging yet satisfying subject to explore, given their rigid frames, spokes and chains. “Also, the roundness is not always round,” Ramsay noted.
These days she finds herself moving in a more abstract direction. Her new work is a massive school of fish, full of movement and light as it disappears into the ocean’s depths. With relatively few brush marks she manages to create a dense and action-filled scene.
(Artwork by Linda Ramsey)
Her commissions range from meaningful compositions to shore-themed originals in custom colors. To get it just right, Ramsay asks clients to give her as much information and insight as possible about the space they intend to fill, down to decor, fabrics, motifs and lighting considerations.
In her own creative process, inspiration might come from a striking photo, she explained. She likes an interesting crop and often makes circular motions with her brushes and tools, hence the bicycles, life preservers and swirled shells of clams and oysters. She works from reference photos and uses a projector if necessary, but relies more on her eye. She uses assorted silicone scrapers with different “teeth” to achieve special effects.
“I actually dig into the paint,” she said.
Lately she’s been experimenting more with the palette knife, she said.
“You have to play,” she said. “You have to keep on trying new things.”
One of her innovations is a form of upcycling, where she paints over old paintings, keeping intact hints of their character.
‘Blue Crab,’ (Artwork by Linda Ramsey)
“I just do this: I take charcoal, and I do all the figures,” she explained, gesturing at a canvas. “I make the figures in the back, in perspective, smaller. Then I think of things people do at the shore.”
Then she paints the sand in the negative spaces, leaving little triangles here and there, “because it gives it action.”
Early in her “beach action” series, she didn’t paint the figures’ skin and swimwear, she said. The charcoal outlines allowed patches of the original underpainting to show through. But a gallery manager told her the work wasn’t selling because customers were not connecting with the figures. “They were all blue,” Ramsay noted. So, she took it back and painted them a spectrum of flesh tones “and then – guess what? – it sold.” Now her beach people range from pale pink to beige to brown.
She keeps them whimsical and intentionally unserious, she said. Embedded are beach umbrellas, dogs, gulls and, always, one naked pair of butt cheeks.
“Those (beach action pieces) are fun to do, especially really, really big,” she said.
— Victoria Ford