Ray Donley

Click for more

“I choose to use such imagery and technique as a point of departure for exploring a world that is idiosyncratic, personal, and capable of transcending time and place. And whereas much of the portraiture of the Renaissance and Baroque sought to reveal something of the state of mind of the subject, there is an aspect of my work that seeks to turn this idea around by presenting a kind of imagery that, instead, reveals something about the state of mind of the viewer.”

-- Ray Donley

Ray Donley’s dramatic figurative style – full of high-contrast lighting – evokes the Dutch and Spanish Old Masters, particularly the 17th century portraitists, quite deliberately – that was the work that interested him as a young man. 14th and 15th century painters were “too Apollonian to me, too statue-like – but by the 17th century the painters looked like they were having fun, they were slapping the paint around.”