Size: 38cm x 49cm [w x h]
media: Oil on Canvas
price: £1650; $2694; 2489

Biographical Note:

Ray Donley was born in Austin, Texas, in 1950. He attended The University of Texas at Austin, graduating cum laude in 1981. He completed his master's degree in art history - with a particular focus on Dutch and Spanish baroque art - in 1983. Since 1981 Ray Donley has exhibited in numerous museums, universities, and galleries throughout the U.S. At the same time, his figurative paintings have attracted collectors from Hollywood to New York. He and his wife Sharon divide their time between Austin, New York City, and Guanajuato, Mexico.

Artist's Statement
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 nonnarrative art that is rich with mythic and symbolic potential

Five of Donley's paintings are featured in the upcoming Alan Parker film The Life of David Gale to be released in January. The story follows a University of Texas professor, Dr. David Gale, an advocate for the abolishment of capital punishment, who is falsely convicted of the rape and murder of another activist. He suddenly finds himself on death row and the film is told in flashbacks with a female reporter interviewing Gale.

The cast includes Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney, Gabriel Mann and Rhona Mitra and the film was written by Charles Randolph (II).