Lot 217
Don Gray
American, (b. 1935)
The Red Chair, 1965
gouache on paper
Signed and dated lower right. Includes a biography and hand-written letter concerning the painting that is addressed to "Mr. Gray".
Biography from the Archives of askART: The following, submitted April 2004, is from the artist.
Don Gray paints realistic still-lifes, landscapes, figures and self-portraits in acrylic, pastel, casein (opaque watercolor) and oil. He has an extensive record of exhibitions, and is represented in private and corporate collections. He is married to expressionist landscape painter, Jessie Benton Evans.
Gray has always been committed to the reality of the world we see and live in, considering himself a poetic-realist painter. He feels that the common objects of the world -- apples, rocks, trees -- in addition to people, are not only beautiful in themselves, but resonate with deep feeling and spiritual presence. He feels there is a fundamental truth of life residing in these things of the world, not only in how they look, but in their density of form. Despite the realism of his work, he is less concerned with detailed, photographic, surface realism than with fundamental, rock-solid form, which he equates with the ultimate meaning of existence.
Gray feels more of a connection with artists of the past whose art directly reflected the world and their experience of it. They used reality as a vehicle for the expression of timeless human emotions and aspirations, whereas many contemporary artists do not. This is one reason why in many of his still-lifes, he will place art books with paintings of such masters as Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Cezanne and Van Gogh as objects in his still-lifes. The books express the relationship he feels with these artists and his belief in their artistic philosophies, as well as using their images to enhance the beauty and symbolic meaning of his own still-life paintings.
Like other introspective artists, Don Gray has painted and drawn a number of self-portraits in a variety of media. In many respects, he considers himself a draughtsman-painter, an artist very involved with drawing. Because of this and his love of color, pastels have loomed large in his work. While primarily a still-life painter, he has also worked extensively with landscape.
Gray received his B.A. degree in art from Arizona State University; his M.A. degree in art from the University of Iowa.
Born in California, but raised in Arizona (and now living there), Gray's extensive arts background is centered in New York City, where he lived for twenty-five years. A poet and art critic as well as a painter, Gray wrote in New York for the New York Arts Journal, Times Herald-Record newspaper, Applause and Sunstorm magazines, and as Senior Editor of Art World.
Living in Phoenix, Arizona for the past ten years, he was Visual Arts Editor of Ashes arts newspaper. In New York he produced and moderated "Artist and Critic," a program on art on Manhattan Cable Television, interviewing artists Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, Alice Neel, Raphael Soyer, Isabel Bishop, critics Dore Ashton, John Canaday, Theodore Wolff, collector Robert Scull. Other programs included Monet at Giverny (with Metropolitan Museum of Art); Expressive Symbolism in Cezanne; Matisse; The Mechanization of Art: Effects of Technology on 20th Century Art; Rembrandt and Van Gogh: The Self-Portrait.
About his paintings, Art News describes Gray's "passion and seriousness extraordinary intensity of feeling, keen intelligence and a thorough knowledge of art past and presentHis works have a riveting immediacy yet function on a symbolic level as well. Although the concept of the 'masterpiece' seems to have gone out of style, this is a word that constantly comes to mind in confronting Gray's major works." The Christian Science Monitor says, "Thisis the kind of picture earlier artists produced to establish their right to be called 'master.'" The New York Times
States, "The compelling intensity of Don Gray's figures makes an immediate, striking impression, and these paintings have a tendency to dominate the gallery." The Philadelphia Inquirer says, "These emphatic works feature a greater virtuosity in paint handling than we commonly see today."
Author Kurt Vonnegut writes:
"I was so stimulated and beguiled by what Don Gray said on television that I declared myself a fan of his. A lot of what he said, being so fundamental, was applicable to arts in general, including my own, which is writing. He is obsessed by the actual content of works of art, as contrasted with technical advances they may represent, and so am I.
He is an able and moving painter. He can draw. It shows. He has ideas. They show. {Gray is) an admirable painter who can speak with more clarity about the actual content and effects of art than any critic I know."
- Dimensions: 26 1/2"H x 20"W
- Medium: gouache on paper
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