#23: November 6th, 2025

On the Work of Sue and Al Ravitz
By Benjamin Terrell

Al Ravitz
Untitled, acrylic on panel

The hens finally started laying eggs!
What a relief!
All of the eggs had double yolks!
How auspicious!
The yellow of the yolks was as vibrant as a Hansa yellow painting.
So chromatic!

​The painting looked like Thomas Nozkowski baked a cake from Forest
Bess’s beating heart. Like if you cracked open a brittle Albert Pinkham
Ryder and found it contained cadmium candy.
Is that possible?
Or is the glowing impasto this painting’s pajamas? You woke up in the orchard
in your nightgown, We too, are things separated only by other subtle things.
Pottery pieces found in a potter’s soil?

Sue Ravitz
Needlepoint

A son finds his father again changing a tire between the lines of a Philip Levine poem.
Two parts of the same painting meet for the first time enmeshed in patterns of awkward
icing.
“Spreading slowly over the oiled surface of the river that runs through every child’s dream.”
And how to even begin to discuss a textile? Thread over and under other thread knows more
about us than we know about ourselves. Textile-the most intersected artistic order that might be
the freest and purest of all mediums.
Strengthened by its interdependence.

Sue Ravitz
Cross-stitch

​Life, I surrender, you have become stranger than my best words can describe.
Art, you are a chevron screen saver still seen shining after the power goes out, an unbroken
path of the hand hiding between harmonious hues.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp weaves through Atta Kwami’s neighborhood with a front seat full
of fractals.
When something is healing it itches, while something is growing it aches. We will leave
this shell both reluctant and divided with more questions than answers to the great mysteries.
We are symmetry breaking and symmetry binding.

Al Ravitz
Untitled, acrylic on panel

Sue Ravitz
​Needlepoint
​

At One Wall Gallery in Eugene, OR (October - November, 2025)