Toward the end of my interview with Ralph Pugay, at his southeast Portland studio, I asked: “what do you see for your future?” Usually the question gives artists a chance to reveal their visions, dreams, and plans. Pugay’s response: “what a weird question!” For him, looking to the future isn’t the point at all.
But I shouldn’t have expected any standard answers from Ralph Pugay — there’s nothing usual about his work. His paintings often depict scenes of people and creatures in the midst of odd situations: dozens of spiders in their webs eating popcorn; a man in a suit soaking up the rays of a microwave oven; a pack of dogs ordering lunch at a fast food restaurant.
“I love Ralph’s work because it’s shocking and just not what you expect of a painting,” says Ashley Stull Meyers, Horning Chief Curator at PRAx in Corvallis. “It’s not like super polite portraiture. It’s not abstracted in a way that we’re used to seeing like the old masters in museums do. It’s not often that a painting makes you laugh in a good way. And I think that that’s a tremendous accolade to Ralph and his work.”
Ralph Pugay "Rothkos in Space," acrylic on canvas, 24"x24", 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Ralph Pugay
Pugay considers each painting as a character. “They’re just trying to get me to tease out something about them that I might not know yet. Oftentimes the work that I create is absurd. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re horrific.”
When we visited Pugay he was working on a complex, colorful painting that shows people “smoking and vaping alongside cars that are blowing smoke into the atmosphere,” he told me. “I feel like it’s one of those paintings where it’s going to have a turn that I didn’t expect, but I don’t know where that’s going yet. And to me, that feels really exciting.”
Pugay was born in the Philippines and moved to the U.S. with his family when he was a teenager. The move was disorienting, and he took refuge in video games, including the world making game The Sims. The iconic pixelated characters stuck in his mind.
Years later, in art school, he was trained to paint observationally, but he was much more interested in painting images from his mind, not from the real world. As he began to develop his unique style, the figures were “almost like sprites,” he says, like characters from a game. “Very archetypal. They all convey something subconscious. And I’m just rearranging them, knowing that they convey something to people as characters.”
In the past year, Pugay has seen a growing level of success and visibility, with shows at Adams and Ollman and the University of Oregon Center for Art Research.
“I’m thrilled to see him getting some attention for what he does because it’s well deserved,” says Stull Meyers. “Not enough art makes you laugh. And so I’m glad that’s a space that he occupies… I want to see room for more Ralph’s in the art that we’re looking at.”
And yes, Pugay did eventually answer my question about his future, he just needed a minute to get over its absurdity. “I see my future continuing to evolve and grow as an artist,” he says, “and continuing to surprise myself maybe, in terms of what will come out of the works that I do… and hopefully continuing to do this stuff, because I love it so much.”