David Ricketts – Artist Statement & Biography

I remember sitting in my room on Warrior Road in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, around age five, convinced I could fly. At that age, Imagery arrived early and stayed.I don’t make pictures of those early visions. I work from the same inner source—where images arrive before they can be explained.

Much of my work begins without a plan. It emerges layer by layer, like memory—or weather. I often return to the same piece repeatedly, especially in the Spirit series, which holds some of my most personal and long-labored images. What I once thought finished becomes a seed again. I re-enter, rework, and another version appears. There’s rarely finality—only process, only becoming.

I often start with something familiar—sometimes even a self-portrait—and then it breaks open. A metamorphosis begins. Older paintings and drawings are pulled forward through digital transformation; photographs sometimes enter the terrain. I’ve embedded century-old beetle illustrations from National Geographic into new digital space. What unites the work is a refusal to imitate. I’m not chasing realism. I’m chasing resonance.

I trust a stream-of-consciousness approach because it lets the imagination speak before the intellect tries to tidy it up. I’m drawn to what grows in the shade—what is hidden, overlooked, or quiet. These images bloom slowly, far from certainty.

Technically, I work with digital layers as if they were translucent memories: patterns repeat, shift, and echo. Figures often arrive in threes—open mouths, masked faces, raised hands. It isn’t performance. It’s transmission. Even when humor and absurdity appear, they come from the same instinct: to let what arrives remain alive.

Although my recent work is largely digital, my roots are in drawing and painting, and I feel a strong pull back toward physical materials. Like the images themselves, the practice keeps changing.

Biography

David Ricketts was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and raised in a post-WWII brick home in Drexel Hill. He was the oldest of four, growing up in a lively household that later moved closer to Valley Forge. His father, a draftsman, introduced him to drawing—planting early seeds for a lifelong creative path.

Artistic lineage runs through his family, with a pre-Civil War self-portrait by his great-great-grandfather, a Vermont lawyer, and numerous paintings by his great-grandmother. Ricketts studied at Marlboro College under Frank Stout, at the University of Vermont with Robert Rindler, and later at the Philadelphia College of Art and Temple University. A formative six-month backpacking journey through Europe in 1971 expanded his artistic outlook.

In his twenties, he lived briefly in a YMCA homeless shelter in Burlington, Vermont—an experience marked by a vivid dream in which his older self gifted him a third eye of light. That dream, forgotten and later remembered, became a core symbol in his creative path. It led him back to the work.

Ricketts collaborated with the Vermont Council on the Arts and has shown his work at venues such as the Fleming Museum, Francis Colburn Gallery at UVM, Backroom Gallery in St. Johnsbury, and Space Gallery in Burlington. His work is known for its emotional intensity, layered textures, and spiritual undertones.

He continues to draw from a deep well of intuition, memory, and transformation—honoring the old while always uncovering what’s still waiting to arrive.

  hemlocktree@gmail.com   Instagram: ricketts4131