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The Persistence of Vision

Fifty Years of Oil Painting by Ricker Winsor

The Persistence of Vision, Fifty Years of Oil Painting by Ricker Winsor To survey the paintings of Ricker Winsor is to trace a life not only lived, but deeply observed, absorbed, and rendered through the timeless lens of oil on canvas. These works, spanning fifty years, are not a retrospective in the conventional sense, but rather a continuous unfolding—a painter’s dialogue with the world as it passes, settles, and returns through memory and sensation. Winsor’s oeuvre resists categorization even as it acknowledges the lineage of modernist painting. Undeniably, Ricker has been deeply influenced by Vincent Van Gogh but not in the sense of imitating but more in the sense of profound identification emotionally, and a shared sensibility. Also, there are echoes of the Fauves in the saturated, confident palette; of the Ashcan School in his attention to the everyday; and of Cézanne in the structural intelligence underpinning his compositions. But what emerges most clearly is a wholly individual voice, unburdened by theory and anchored in direct experience. What is striking across this collection is the painter’s restless fidelity to place.  Winsor engages his surroundings with an immediacy that is both physical and emotional. These are not landscapes in the decorative sense; they are encounters, records of sensation—what it felt like to be there, at that time, looking with a painter’s eye and a poet’s intuition. There is a tactile honesty in his brushwork, a kind of painterly speech that ranges from terse to lyrical. In earlier works, one senses a disciplined observation, the marks careful and measured. But as the decades unfold, the surface becomes more alive, more interpretive, even ecstatic at times. In Flamboyant and Two Men, color becomes language; in Everything Affects Us, form flirts with abstraction, suggesting that the painter is not merely recording but also reflecting—on age, impermanence, and perception itself. Human presence—sometimes explicit, sometimes only implied—threads through the work with subtle insistence. In Mother and Child, it is intimate and quiet; in Washington Square Park, diffuse and urban. Yet even in ostensibly unpeopled scenes, there is always a sense of life—the artist’s or others,’ past or present—pressing in from the margins. Winsor does not paint to impress; he paints to see, and through that seeing, to understand. His work refuses the artificial polish of the market and instead offers us something rarer: a visual memoir of decades spent chasing the elusive truths of light, form, and being. In an age dominated by speed and spectacle, these paintings are meditations. They ask us not to look at them, but to look with them—to slow down, to inhabit a space, to feel the weather, the time of day, the hush or clatter of a world in motion. This book is not only a collection of images. It is a testament to what it means to be awake in the world.

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