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Danvers at Night: Candles
Michael Ramseur
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These fascinating studies are the work of a historian in the same sense that Van Gogh observed, rendered, interpreted, and finally entered his environment to paint it from the insiude out. Having absorbed fundamentals at Boston’s Museum School of Fine Arts, Ramseur developed his fascination with environments by recording the changing faces of the Boston subway system and the Lawrence mills. In 1986 he began his involvement with the Danvers site, and his work has been shown in galleries including the Addison Gallery of American Art. In April of 1999, New Yorker Magazine commissioned his drawings to illustrate “Strange Love”, Elsa Welch’s story of 2 St. Elizabeth’s Hospital patients in Washington D.C.-- one of them John W. Hinckley, Jr.

Snow Aerial # 4
Michael Ramseur

DSH, pink and green
Michael Ramseur

Ramseur records the fragility of human beings as well as the shimmering, glowing, shadowy, someimes sinister impenetrability of their shelter, their home, their "prison".

In 2000, Ramseur was interviewed for the TV production Gothic Asylums and in 2001, showed his work in conjunction with the opening of Session Nine, a U.S.A. fiction-film release filmed at the Danvers hospital site. (See DVD, Film, Sites)

Central Administration Building, Yellow Sky
Michael Ramseur

Patient Asleep
Michael Ramseur

A reminder from Gallery Artship: SEE THESE IMAGES AND MANY MORE IN RAMSEUR'S 265-page HISTORY: click here for HAUNTED PALACE

In the words of Michael Ramseur:

As I walked through the recently cleared plots of land, I looked up over the northern stone wall and the adjoining field where, just a short while before, we had released balloons. I peered through the tangle of naked tree branches, intertwined like so many gnarled limbs, and saw the dark silhouette of 'A' wing on the eastern side of the hospital. It seemed to be brooding over this public gathering in the 'pauper graveyards.' The sharp points of the hospital wing loomed forebodingly. I experienced the eeriest feeling--one that came close to reconciling the dichotomies of Danvers. I realized the institution had been a home, but now I wondered, what sort of home? Viewed from the stone wall that formed one side of the graveyard, it seemed a monstrous one. Many questions have crowded my mind about Danvers. For instance, I have wondered what this hospital looked like at night before the advent of electricity. Did the candles highlight the silhouettes of human figures from within? How many generations of crows and pigeons have inhabited the worn gray wooden air shafts, whose vents are shaped like a bird's wings? What did Danvers smell like when the institution succumbed to 'the evils of overcrowding'? Had the electric fans that were installed in the ventilation towers in 1894 actually relieved the stench of rising misery in the overcrowded Castle? ...
DSH, Grass In Flames
Michael Ramseur
 
'I' Building, Red Sky
Michael Ramseur
Ghosts Michael Ramseur As we walk the Ramseur image-corridor, finally, as we reach the end, we begin to feel that we are leaving our skin-- slipping out of the role of the observer and crossing over, into the world and the dreams of the residents... where the buildings shimmer and distort, ghosts materialize out of walls and the fountains spurt blood. The pen, crayon and brush now truly render the reality of the Insane.

Vortex, Image # 11: Entry with Patients Michael Ramseur

Antoinette
Michael Ramseur
These words from Poe are fitting:

O from the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold --
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by--
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(when the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

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