The paintings for Blind Corners, Portals and Turning Points were started in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2010 and was completed in Oregon during 2011. I was inspired by mixtures of ancient and colonial architecture, patterned folk art and the weavings of Zapotec Mexico. Moreover, I sought to instill in the work the distinct mysticism, romance and worldview inherent in that sometimes troubled mestizo culture.

(from the catalog)

Ron Mills paintings point to what in creation is, fragile, even possibly frail in a world of powerful simmering explosions of color and beautiful molecular sub realities. The delicate and sometimes daunting balance in nature we sense when we see Mills’ s best work has nothing to do with insubstantiality, but rather his work evokes what is truly essential, uncovering the fundamental nature of being beyond individual parts to show true essence. We see organic raw material mingled to become enigmatic organisms with self will. Are we viewing construction or deconstruction? The emerging or submerging in the primordial soup of life? Are we witnesses to active forces creating, evolving slowly from essence through individual definition of parts to the final becoming of an organism or are we viewing the reverse process? The becoming is governed by the essence of what is trying to push to the foreground. It can feel threatening because it feels unstable to the observer and unveils what we have always feared deep inside, that the world is capricious and unpredictable. We are confronted with the dichotomy of creation, good and evil, but mostly the uneasy feeling of randomness in creation. The possibility, likelihood, of this wantonness in creation challenges our determinist view and the sense of order we labor to bring to our lives. We can experience the deconstruction of what is, threatening what we think as concrete and real. In Mills’ paintings we do not know if we are seeing the beginning or the end, but we know we are seeing the essence of organic life going through molecular metamorphosis with all its colorful, textural, and at times terrible beauty.

María Isabel Piñas Espigulé, March, 2010