"My paintings extend many of the ideas of portraiture and psychological exploration first articulated by the Renaissance and Baroque masters. The power of the imagery and the audacity of the technique demonstrated in much Baroque portraiture, for example, have fascinated me since my days as a graduate student of Dutch and Spanish 17th-century art. But rather than create anachronisms for their own sake, 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. Thus, in rendering these fictional portraits in a painterly, quasi-baroque style, I create a world of solitary itinerants, who, together, comprise what I term "los bien perdidos," or "the lost ones." With their suggestions of silence, solitude, reverie and even madness these paintings are meant to evoke aspects of our more reflective (and sometimes darker) states. By tapping into these reflective states, I seek to create a non-narrative art that is rich with mythic and symbolic potential."
Ray Donley was born in Austin, Texas in 1950. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Texas in 1981 and completed his master's degree in art history in 1983. Donley's work is exhibited extensively throughout the United States in museums, universities, and galleries. Ray is also represented around the world in Rome, London, and Mexico City.
Five of Donley's paintings are featured in the Kevin Spacey film The Life of David Gale. In the fall of 2002, he won "Best in Show" in an international group biennial in San Remo, Italy, a significant achievement, especially for an American artist
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