Ronald Slayton

Ronald Slayton

The Road Less Traveled, 1970’s

Original Water color with estate stamp

18” x 20” framed

Value : $2000.00

Ronald Slayton (1910-1992) is among Vermont’s best and well known native artists. Slayton was a poet, a teacher in central Vermont public schools and longtime curator of Montpelier’s Wood Art Gallery. He was among the first Vermont artists to paint in a distinctly modernist manner and began his career in the 1930s, and at first, painted in an earthy, muscular version of the prevailing Social Realist style. After attending the prestigious New York art school, the Pratt Institute, he moved to Burlington. From 1935 to 1943 he painted for the federally funded WPA Easel Painters Project, which paid professional artists a stipend to paint a certain number of works a year. Much of the work he created during that time was tinged with the struggles of the Depression.  As his work changed and developed Slayton’s style has been connected to that of Van Gogh. “If you look at that painting ‘The Planter’ (1937), the boots are highlighted with little tiny strokes of pure color,” his son said. “That’s a technique that’s very reminiscent of Van Gogh.”

Many have credited Slayton for his brilliant sense of composition and color sense.
The watercolors show that really strongly though they are quieter and more peaceful than the pieces in his Depression-era collection. His 1975 wet-on-wet “Purple Mountains Majesty” seems to have been painted with joy, as colors effortlessly flow together and harmonize. Rich purples laid down with a few broad strokes are framed by evergreen branches made with a slightly dryer, smaller brush. The white passages of negative space are crisp, and a few watery brushes of indigo and blue form a high, calm sky.

Donated by Billi and Bobby Gosh