Lot 205
Don Gray
Arizona, New York, (b. 1935)
Casa Allegra, 1964
graphite on paper
Signed, dated, and titled lower right.
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."
- Provenance: Born in 1948, Don Gray credit's his earliest inspirations to the landscape of his childhood in rural northeast Oregon. He studied art at Eastern Oregon University, training his eye and hand in traditional techniques that resulted in meticulously rendered realist paintings.After graduation in 1970, Gray taught high school art for one year, before beginning a professional art career. He exhibited widely in the Pacific Northwest, developing a regional following for his landscapes and figures.In 1978 Gray formed a partnership, Bear Wallow Publishing, with writer Rick Steber and photographer Jerry Gildemeister. Their co-creations were coffee-table style illustrated books of western history. Traces, published in 1980, documented the last surviving travelers of the Oregon Trail.In the mid-1980's, Don Gray's realist style began to change as he experimented with a more spontaneous approach. His current work combines the traditional with a more contemporary idiom, as exterior observation gives way to interior search. Gray describes this process as "like a random walk in the woods, with no idea where it might lead. Along the way, free association and unexpected discoveries are encouraged. The paintings become artifacts of an intuitive process, not literal representations of pre-determined ideas or images."Don Gray has taught occasional workshops and college-level courses, painted indoor and outdoor murals in several states, and illustrated over twenty books. He and his wife Brenda live in Murrieta, California.
- Dimensions: 11 1/8"H x 8 1/2"W
- Medium: graphite on paper
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