Owen Gray - Artist Statement

I was raised in Wayland, Massachusetts. My father went to art school and became a commercial artist in the Boston area. He encouraged me to attend art school as well. As a young man, I studied art at the Portland School of Art in Maine and the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, MA. In 1975, I moved to New York and took classes at the New York Studio School, where I studied with Nicholas Carone and Leland Bell. I currently split my time between ·my home in Tribeca, New York City and my studio in Hoboken, New Jersey.

 

I have been influenced by the exaggerated lighting, compositional intricacies and Baroque dynamism of the old masters such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Francisco Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel.

In 1996 I took a trip to visit Florida which inspired a series of paintings of the Everglades, including the tropical foliage and swampy terrain inhabited by reptiles such as snakes, alligators, and turtles. This trip commenced an ongoing thematic interest in animals, wildlife and the environment.
 

Over the years, I have continued this visual research of creatures and animals with regular visits to the Bronx Zoo and the American Museum of Natural History, as well as return trips to Florida. I look around me and find visual inspiration from what I see, transforming the elements into a fantasy world where floating parrots, flying mandolins, and cactus-headed figures evolve into one another. I am attracted to the dramatic light of open skies which my imagination inhabits with spiraling falling objects, animals, and creatures. I am fascinated by aquatic swampy realms teeming with life, which offer the possibility of sensational compositions. I have been interested in climate change with the destruction of the Amazon Forest.  Recently I've been producing paintings of smoldering landscapes of cypress trees as far as the eye can see.