In 1965, Ralph Goings received his Masters degree in Fine Art from Sacramento State University, and soon after began working as a high school art teacher. Still pursuing his own approach on depicting reality, Ralph Goings put aside copying from magazines and began taking his own photographs, which he used as the subjects for his paintings. This method gave Ralph Goings a great sense of autonomy over what he was rendering in his paintings, and opened up new doors for what his subject matter could be. The practice of painting directly from photographs is something Photorealists are still criticized for today because many see it as a sign of a lack of original imagination. However, Ralph Goings saw the process of working from his own photographs to be incredibly freeing. Ralph Goings understood that a quickly taken photograph does not have the same visual selectivity as the human eye. Ralph Goings referred to the camera as being a democratic tool that assisted him in giving each piece of his painting an equal opportunity. Through this perspective Ralph Goings believed that a stool in a painting should be given the same artistic attention as the person that is sitting upon it. The camera gave Ralph Goings the ability to see the beauty found in a glimpse of mundane items existing in candid reality. The devotion Ralph Goings has to each painting is evident in how tenderly each aspect of a scene is rendered. Ralph Goings is in tune with every detail of his paintings in order to present to us an image of everyday life that he felt needed to be shared. Ralph Goings recalls how there would be beautiful aspects of a photograph he had not even noticed until after he developed the film, such as a suggestive shadow or reflection. The honesty of an image the camera produces is why Ralph Goings dedicated himself to creating art through this photograph-to-painting process.

In 1969, Ralph Goings was invited to participate in a group show titled “Views of Sacramento”. While traveling the city looking for inspiration he became entranced by the sight of a customized pickup truck. Following this incidence, Ralph Goings took photographs of pickups all over Sacramento and began painting them. Ralph Goings began to recognize the pickup as a relic of American history, at first used for work and now seen as a status symbol that gave a nod to the end of an era. Ralph Goings glorified these objects by keeping in tact the truth of the form, but also giving the scene a sophistication that cannot be captured with a photograph. Once he selected the image he wanted to use, he would project the slide onto a canvas and pencil in the lines and details. The photograph would eventually be transformed into a painting, but with more detail and clarity than the human eye could see in real life. The end result would have a painted surface, but without pronounced brush strokes giving the painting a texturally “real” effect, not manufactured. Ralph Goings never cropped the image to center it around the subject matter, allowing all the stray shadows and figures surrounding the subject to remain. This practice ensured the painting would possess the quality of a snapshot as Ralph Goings transferred the image onto the canvas. Instead of forcing a painting to have an exact compositional plan, Ralph Goings would go about creating a painting in an intuitive way in order to avoid having the scene look overworked or posed. Ralph Goings would simply be attracted to a scene or a photograph he had taken, and that is how he planned the layout for his painting. Therefore, the paintings have a natural quality to them as if you stumbled upon the scene yourself.

In the early 1970′s Ralph Goings ventured into other subject matter, looking beyond the parked trucks to the environment around them, where the fast food stores and highway stands resided. As Ralph Goings began to depict the largely ignored visual sprawl in California his audience questioned if there were further social implications behind his subject matter. However, the intention of Ralph Goings was only to create representations of overlooked and often criticized American scenery that he found visually appealing. Ralph Goings painted the exteriors of the fast food restaurants, with wide-open blue skies framing the geometric architecture of the colorful buildings. In 1972, Ralph Goings became curious about the interior setting of such restaurants, and painted works that took a look at this setting from an inward, closed off perspective. Instead, Ralph Goings became enthralled by the strength of reflections and light pouring in through the windows that existed in these interiors. Ralph Goings began to recognize the difference between how light is perceived by the human eye and how light is captured by the camera. These indoor paintings prove the true light captured by a camera to be much more altering than how the scene would appear through the human eye, which naturally blurs the effect light has on the environment. A trademark of these early paintings of Ralph Goings is the absence of people in the scenes. The subjects of his paintings are objects and locations that would not exist without people, yet Ralph Goings purposefully eliminated any figures in his paintings. Ralph Goings felt that a person was too often the main subject of a piece of art, and even when this is not the intention of the artist, the audience will find the figure to be the most interesting part of a painting. His goal was to stress the importance of the environment and every day objects and not have the audience distracted by figures. Therefore, when people began to appear in the early work of Ralph Goings they were made as inanimate as possible by being very detached and distant from the rest of the details in the painting. Ralph Goings would not change this about his work until he found the people in his paintings to be of greater importance than in his California works.