{"id":5194,"date":"2024-01-25T11:09:57","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T16:09:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/?p=5194"},"modified":"2024-01-25T11:09:59","modified_gmt":"2024-01-25T16:09:59","slug":"the-evolution-of-passages-artist-ron-gianola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/betsiecurrent.com\/index.php\/the-evolution-of-passages-artist-ron-gianola\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of Passages"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Local artist Ron Gianola\u2019s work spans decades and genres<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Keith Schneider<\/strong>
Current Contributor<\/strong>

The one unmistakable element in Ron Gianola\u2019s arresting \u201cPassages\u201d paintings is his command in brush, knife, and single pigment colors to produce abstract images, endowed with energy and motion.\u00a0

The Passages collection\u2014which Gianola started about a decade ago\u2014has a readily available narrative expressed by freedom from constraint and realized through freeform rhythm. The paintings are a visual declaration, much like Gianola\u2019s other artistic expression as a jazz drummer. The immediate effect is like watching clouds changing shape in a wind-blown sunset.

Some 65 of Gianola\u2019s paintings\u2014which measure his evolution from auto-industry draftsman to portraiture to landscapes, to ultimately reach artistic prominence with his unique Passages canvasses\u2014were on display recently from September 15, 2023, through January 7, 2024, at the Dennos Museum Center at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City. The exhibition also featured Stephen Duren, a noted West Michigan landscape artist, and 10 artists connected to the Tusen Takk Foundation, a Leelanau County artist-residency program.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Ron
Ron Gianola\u2019s mastery of the abstract\u2014unfolding in a cloud of color, emotion, and movement\u2014is expressed in Passages #213, painted last year. Gianola’s paintings are the result of more than 50 years of \u201cpursuing the possibilities of a personal transformative vision that engages emotion, expression, and the poetry of visual music,\u201d according to the Dennos Museum, where Gianola recently had a solo exhibition. Image courtesy of Ron Gianola.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

If art defines the artist, then the bright blending of movement, fine skill, precision, and resolve in Passages is an apt reflection of Gianola. It is all interesting, determined, and under control.\u00a0

He is 73 years old and has spent a lifetime exploring his artistic instinct, even as he understood the need to support himself financially as a well-recognized machine tool designer and draftsman in Michigan\u2019s auto sector. The older of two sons, he was raised on Detroit\u2019s working-class east side. Even before he graduated from Cass Technical High School, a magnet school, Gianola attracted attention for his drawing and design skills and began working in the Motor City\u2019s auto sector, where he stayed, mostly as a freelancer, until the Great Recession in 2008.\u00a0

\u201cI was a car nut,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what I wanted to do. Work in styling. I had an uncle that was a model maker. I just grew up in that culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"delorean
The DeLorean phase of Ron Gianola\u2019s career\u2014a future design executed while he was in high school in the late 1960s. Hailing from Detroit originally, the city\u2019s rich culture of automobiles and music seeped into his bones, while the beauty of Benzie County\u2019s landscapes inspired Gianola\u2019s painting career to \u201cexplore the creative, personal, and humanist side of life, mind, and spirit\u2026 embodying the essential mystery and spiritual beauty of nature and the human psyche,\u201d according to the Dennos Museum, where Gianola recently had a solo exhibition. Image courtesy of Ron Gianola.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the other side of his creative instinct, he sought excellence in music and fine art. Detroit\u2019s jazz musicians sought him out as a drummer. And with wages earned as a designer, he studied art and began painting at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts, a private art and design college now known as the College For Creative Studies.\u00a0

\u201cI was starting to draw figures at Arts and Crafts,\u201d he says. \u201cEven if you\u2019re in industrial design, you should have a fine art background. You should have art history. Basic design. Basic color. Photography. History of material. The whole bit, right? So I was somewhat in fine art at that point, including figure drawing, which I had never done in my life. And I thought, Whoa, how did this happen? This is too weird, even for me!<\/em> But I was good at figure drawing. And I just fell in love with art.\u201d

He also fell in love with his wife, Pam Yee (73), and the pair eventually made the move to Benzie County in the 1990s.\u00a0

They had known each other as teenagers in Detroit, where Yee also attended Cass Tech and graduated in the same class as Gianola, before going their separate ways. She raised two sons and worked as a Wayne County Circuit Court clerk. The two reconnected at their 10th high school reunion in 1978, and they married in 1986.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Pam
Portraits of Pam Yee (1987) and Ron Gianola (1982). Image courtesy of Ron Gianola.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

During that period and afterward, Gianola and Yee also made regular visits to Benzie County, spending summer weeks on Platte Lake.\u00a0

In 1990, they paid $40,000 for a house along the Platte River, upstream of Honor, that Gianola renovated during weekend trips from Harper Woods, an inner ring suburb of Detroit. He later added a second floor. He also renovated what he calls \u201ca complete, uninhabited, abandoned wreck\u201d of an outbuilding next door for his studio.\u00a0

In 1995, the river house became their permanent residence and workplace.

While dial-up internet service kept his drafting clients happy\u2014and his income stable\u2014the change in lifestyle and geography had immediate effects on Gianola\u2019s painting. He began to specialize in Benzie landscapes.\u00a0

\u201cIt\u2019s here. It\u2019s beautiful. It\u2019s for all the reasons we\u2019re all here,\u201d Gianola says.\u00a0

He and Yee also spent time in Hawaii, where he met Lau Chun\u2014a renowned impressionist landscape painter\u2014and studied Chun\u2019s use of color.\u00a0

In 1995, Gianola produced \u201cSummer Serenade,\u201d an impressionist triptych of the garden outside his cozy, sunlit studio. It exhibited Gianola\u2019s maturing craftsmanship and detail, and his understanding of Chun\u2019s color techniques. It was his first masterwork and was chosen by former-Governor Jennifer Granholm (D) to hang in the Governor\u2019s Mansion in Lansing.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Governor
\u201cSummer Serenade,\u201d painted in 1995, shows an example of Ron Gianola\u2019s early work, when he first moved from Detroit to Benzie County. Image courtesy of Ron Gianola.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The path from past pursuits to artistic excellence is seldom short, direct, or free of complications, though.\u00a0

In 2007 and 2008, the Great Recession hammered the auto industry\u2014and drafting work dried up.\u00a0

So, nearing 60, Gianola retired from his auto-industry work and devoted more time to painting. He began to experiment with interiors and geometric shapes and more color-infused abstract images. Gradually, something new and distinctive began to emerge from Gianola\u2019s easel. He called them \u201cPassages,\u201d a reflection of his evolving artistic passion and the intensity of the freedom he was experiencing with his life in the woods.

Passage canvasses were infused with the elusive motion and sound of a fast-flowing river. The art was not primordial or reckless or abandoned. Rather, it was tightly constructed, even as it exclaimed excitement and celebration.\u00a0

Passages was the work of a thinking man who freely creates, with the result that\u2014when he finished\u2014the canvas examined the artist\u2019s presence and his exhilaration.\u00a0

In 2014, Gianola painted Passage #82, another triptych and a masterwork that embodied the beauty and charisma of the collection.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Passages
Hung in the Dennos Museum at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City from September 2023 to January 2024, patrons studied the deep reds and skyline colors of Passage #82 and marveled at its power. Image courtesy of Ron Gianola.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI tried to paint like Lau for 12 years,\u201d Gianola says. \u201cIn the end, I never wound up painting like Lau. But\u2014much better\u2014I wound up painting like me, because I worked so hard. Trying to do what I thought Lau was doing, I learned all this technique that I wasn\u2019t paying any attention to. And one day I woke up, and I thought, Well, you know what? That doesn\u2019t look like Lau. That looks like a great painting that I didn\u2019t intend to do.<\/em> You know, you struggle and try so hard to get there that you learn some other stuff on the way. After 50 years, you\u2019ve actually learned a few things.\u201d

Passages elevated Gianola\u2019s work to prominence and stature that only a handful of Benzie County artists have achieved. Among them are Gwen Frostic, the nature block-print maker; Roland Roycraft, the landscape watercolorist; and Dewey Blocksma, an avant garde sculpture artist. (Editor\u2019s Note: <\/strong>See The Betsie Current\u2019<\/em>s 2019 profile on Blocksma in our online archives.)

The leaders of the Dennos Museum certainly understood what was happening in Gianola\u2019s studio and invited him to display Passages at the end of last year.\u00a0

\u201cRon continues to find new ways to explore themes and ideas that excite him. That\u2019s what really got us interested,\u201d says Craig Hadley, the Dennos Museum director and chief curator. \u201cAnd we\u2019ve never mounted a solo exhibit of his work. That was appealing, as well.\u201d

The solo exhibit at the Dennos\u2014one of Michigan\u2019s finest art museums\u2014was a peak experience in Gianola\u2019s life and his art career. It delivered the public recognition and approbation that Gianola has merited for years.\u00a0

What\u2019s next?\u00a0

Gianola is not clear on that question.\u00a0

\u201cI\u2019m content,\u201d he says. \u201cI did what I wanted to do, or what I felt I should do, which for the longest time seemed kind of impossible. I didn\u2019t have enough time. I was working in this crazy engineering business. It just seemed like chaos. I had to show the world that there was a poetic side to me.\u201d

Ron Gianola\u2019s work can be found at <\/em>RonGianola.com<\/em><\/a> online; likewise, he can be found at<\/em> \u201cRon Gianola\u201d on Facebook<\/em><\/a>. Visits to his studio in Honor can be made by appointment; send an email to Ron@RonGianola.com with any questions regarding price, shipping, or technique.<\/em>

Featured Photo Caption:<\/strong> Ron Gianola\u2019s mastery of the abstract\u2014unfolding in a cloud of color, emotion, and movement\u2014is expressed in his paintings. Gianola’s paintings are the result of more than 50 years of \u201cpursuing the possibilities of a personal transformative vision that engages emotion, expression, and the poetry of visual music,\u201d according to the Dennos Museum, where Gianola recently had a solo exhibition. Image courtesy of Ron Gianola.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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