Borge Point Reyes Gallery

          The son of a Swedish immigrant mother and a father whose Portuguese parents had immigrated from the Azores, Ralph Borge was born in West Oakland, CA on January 11, 1922, the middle child of a working-class family of four boys and one girl.  His ability in art surfaced at an early age.  He drew and painted incessantly, winning numerous local school and newspaper contest awards, and even devising his own cartoon strips.  But perhaps most notable of all, as a young adult he would spend hours creating elaborate stage sets in miniature, made mostly with wood scraps and other found objects, with different themes and figures but no particular story line and no one but himself to act out or attend his imaginary sketches.

          Later, while in the US Air Force during World War II, Ralph would send his family richly humorous sketches in pen and ink or watercolor about military life.  It also was around this time that his great love for classical music blossomed. While in the service, he later recalled, he would walk back at night to his base camp from some outing, alone and with no musical training, composing whole symphonies in his head.  Just as he had waited in vain for performers and audiences to accompany his ornate stage sets, now his musical compositions went unperformed as well.  After the conclusion of the war, he began a lifetime of collecting recordings performed on the best available high fidelity equipment, blasting and rattling the walls of his studio at times with the sounds of heroic music.  Later, in his teaching days, he would only allow his kind of music--Beethoven and Mahler, Debussy and Shostakovich--to be played in the classroom. 

          Ralph's later, major work, that which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship along with numerous other accolades, bore the mark of his youthful idiosyncrasies.  His symbolic paintings had no story line, no clearly discernible narrative or message, and he left them untitled at first.  He would prepare the atmospheric settings with symbols, waiting for others to give their impressions, their interpretations, their labels, and he loved it when they did.  But the power behind these symbols in the form of material bric-a-brac, junk, things, sometimes people, was enormous. The ornately distilled expressions of what he had felt growing up in Oakland- in a family with limited economic means and very little dialogue or discourse or curiosity about life's deeper meanings - has moved others in a dynamic way.  Still working alone, he finally found his audience.