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drawing or thinking about ”
Ramsay did very little art on his own because of the time constraints and the stress of long days at the hospital, but he found his creative outlet in matching his patients with art volunteers from the community, as well as promoting large scale art collaborations involving as many as 70 people.
“The patients, psychologist and nursing staff would be sitting around in a circle,” he said, “and I had developed a way to do large murals. We would all get up and draw together, color together on this big sheet of Kraft paper on a 4 x 8 foot frame. And I got even more skillful on understanding what was being drawn there by the patients as well.”
He also developed a new skill based on the very real need to defend himself from the patients, “because we got attacked once in a while.” So he began taking classes in Hapkido, the Korean art of selfdefense, and eventually he left the hospital and began teaching full-time until his retirement.
By then, he had begun painting again in his preferred medium of acrylics and developing what are now his abstractions of mostly recognizable landscapes and interiors.
“I loved to hike and would come out from my home in Fairfax and hike the Appalachian Trail and places like Harris Hollow. So I knew this area, knew' that I wanted to move out here. I became a member of Middle Street Gallery in the early 1990s and one day in 1998,1 saw an ad in the Rappahannock News for my future home in Harris Hollow, and 1 knew exactly which it was. having hiked past it many, many times,” he said.
“What has changed over these 25 years and it continues to change is my aesthetics, what I think is beautiful, or what 1 think is the wray to go about making a picture, or when I think a picture is completed.
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