Thursday, September 25, 2008


Ancestor 3

Acrylic on paper, 6 1/2" x 5"
$125.00 + $6.00 shipping in US.
Available for purchase starting 09/25/08, 12 noon PST

4 comments:

Sheila Vaughan said...

Hi Don, a fascinating series. I like this one best so far. Not just slavishly copying the photos - and not "romanticising" them at all, you are ironically creating a "modern" image, especially I think with this one. Lots of mood to it. Great stuff.

martha miller said...

Hi Don!

Great series! Fun to see portraits! I especially love this one! You have brought it to life, and like Sheila said, without romanticising it. With your knowledge of the figure and of painting, you are making these look like you were working from life which adds to the mystery. It's as if you hopped in a Time Machine to go find people to paint!
There was a student at MECA a few years ago who collected old anonymous baby photos found at yard sales and such, and then "cooked" them all in sugar leaving a drippy caramel colored crystallized coating over each one. Perhaps a comment on our penchant to romanticise a by gone era...

Don Gray said...

Hi Sheila--thanks for those comments, I take them to heart. I'm certainly not interested in depicting some sentimentalized "golden era" with these. The old photos just give me an excuse to explore and invent with paint--to "see what happens" and perhaps surprise myself. And of course, when you do that with human subjects it can't help but be seen as emotionally charged.

Don Gray said...

Hi Martha--great to hear from you and thank you for your insightful comments. Wow--wouldn't it be great to have a time machine like that? I think if we could go back in time we might be startled, though, at how differently we perceive the world.

It seems often we do have a tendency to see the past--even the relatively recent past--through a "good old days" lens. I think anyone who really studies closely the old photos can glimpse a much different picture of what their lives might have been like.