I’ve known Ramsey for going on twenty-five years. We’ve fly-fished together. Shared a few pints together. For years, we were business partners. We’ve watched each other’s kids grow up. I know he likes dogs and Mexican food and Georgia football. From experience, I know he’s a quiet talker who tends to chew on his words. (Hence, using a tape recorder for this interview is pretty much-wasted technology.) These days, Ramsey’s mumbling takes on a new degree of sonic mystery when he attempts to describe himself. As he tells it, “I have a hard time calling myself a fine artist.” The words snag somewhere behind his teeth. He can’t conceive of himself that way. But let me tell you: one glance around his tiny studio on the backside of the Innovate Building in Greenville, and you’ll see more evidence than you need that Ramsey is truly a gifted painter, truly an artist.
Ramsey’s passion for art started early when he was bouncing around Georgia. “I was a preacher’s kid. We moved every three or four years.” At each stop, Ramsey was encouraged by his supportive parents and influential art teachers to follow his passion for painting and illustration, a passion that landed him in a prestigious summer arts program for talented high school students.
After high school, Ramsey matriculated to Young Harris College, where, for two years, he studied painting and drawing as a fine arts major before transferring to the University of Georgia where his focus shifted a bit toward graphic design and illustration. During those high school and college years, Ramsey was always working, but he says, “I never worked in burger joints or the usual places like that. I always had jobs that involved drawing,” like in advertising or at sign shops or designing tee shirts. Sure, he was creating. He was freelancing. He was drawing. But he wasn’t painting. The distance between him and painting grew wider and wider. The circle got larger.
Painting eased even farther away after college when Ramsey came to Greenville to hunt for a job. While I don’t mean to gloss over the next three decades, let’s just say that Ramsey stumbled into the grind of the advertising and marketing world—the world of tight deadlines and demanding clients and coffee-fueled all-nighters at the computer. He worked for a small, local ad agency, then co-founded Greg & Greg Creative, which later merged with what eventually became Brains on Fire. Always more clients, more deadlines, always more coffee.
Sure, he was scrambling around that circle, but his orbit carried him farther and farther from easels and paintbrushes. That is until a local seafood restaurant asked him to provide some new menu illustrations. When Ramsey saw the huge, blank wall in their dining room, he offered to create a series of stylized fish paintings to fill the space. Not long after, a customer saw Ramsey’s fish and asked him about purchasing a trout print for his sons. Long story short, Ramsey ended up painting a trio of trout, fish the son had actually caught. If you’ll pardon the angling pun, that was the moment Ramsey reeled in some of his artistic past. The circle began to close. But Ramsey is quick to point out, “I didn’t just say, okay, let’s go get the brushes and start painting again. It just sort of happened.”
Ramsey’s You Catch. I’ll Paint Series
The series was hatched from this fish-on-the-wall encounter. Since that original commission, he has created an entire collection of You Catch. I’ll Paint. canvases, depicting fish that the clients have caught. (If you want to hear how excited someone can get seeing a fish that they actually caught, captured on canvas, give me a call. Ramsey painted one for my dad’s eighty-fifth birthday. My father was so excited, for a second, I thought we were going to lose him. I’m not a professional art critic, but when your old man hyperventilates over a painting, the artist might be onto something.) Each painting in the series is a super-realistic representation of the fish, so detailed and precise, you can almost see the gills fluttering. Do you know how fisherpeople love to show off photos of their catches? One of Ramsey’s paintings takes fishing pride to a whole new dimension.
Ramsey’s You Catch. I’ll Paint. series proved to be the impetus for him to wholeheartedly reconnect with his artistic past and close that particular circle. He made the tough decision to leave the advertising world and devote himself to painting and illustration, a return to the passion he’d strayed from so many years ago. And speaking of circles, Ramsey’s studio is a small sliver of square footage in the footprint of the original Brains on Fire headquarters on River Street. Each day, he paints in the same space where he used to spend his hours creating campaigns for advertising clients. (Can you hear that circle clanging shut?)
In Ramsey’s studio, bicycles hang from the wide, wooden rafters. His tiny dog—with a bark twice the size of his body—keeps a wary eye on the sidewalk through the glass doors. On the walls, reprints of his trout paintings appear to swim upstream against the exposed bricks. And there are dogs on canvases, realistic renderings of golden retrievers and Springer spaniels. Ramsey’s commissions to capture clients’ pets on canvas led to his current focus, with a different sort of animalistic representation—anthropomorphized dogs, paintings that capture a client’s pet, yet surrounded by bits and pieces of the clients themselves. For example, there’s a dapper mixed-breed terrier in a suit and bow tie and Furman lapel pin, sipping bourbon from a tumbler. There’s a miniature bull terrier perched at a kitchen table, decked out in a western hat and shiny bling, about to munch down on a couple of Taco Bell tacos. And a Sigmund Freud-influenced “therapy terrier” puffs on a pipe amid a stack of psychoanalytic texts. Each time Ramsey tells me how he’s “really just an illustrator that paints real things,” I remind him that he has a bourbon-sipping dog on the wall. “Yeah,” he grins, “but it could be real.”
Turns out, the football coach was probably right. Life is about circles. If you keep traveling, you eventually meet up with the self you walked away from. Greg Ramsey certainly did. And when he found that version of his former self, he gave it a big old hug. He closed the circle. He creates art in the same place where, years ago, he used to punch the proverbial advertising clock. A tinier circle, yes, but one closed nonetheless. Ramsey has been reintroduced to his passion, and from all indications, the artistic relationship is destined to last. Because he is, once again, an artist.
To commission a painting or connect with Greg Ramsey, go to ramseypaints.com.
Photography by Will Crooks
