Chris Ray
Informed by his en plein air oil sketching sessions, Chris paints from memory and imagination. His work is as much a celebration of paint and mark-making as it is in the evoking of somewhere or something vaguely familiar.
Biography
With an underlying passion for the stuff of paint, Chris strives to seek out those marks that perhaps describe more than they should. As a lifelong devotee of the outdoors he has adopted Landscape not only as an endless source of inspiration but also as a vehicle upon which to explore mark making as a pursuit in itself. By not referencing his en plein air oil sketches directly, this allows Chris to instead stalk those elusive bedfellows spontaneity and serendipity. In working this way, at least a soupspoon of abstraction is naturally but deliberately introduced into his work. His primary intention is for his paintings to exhibit an overall figurative impression that the viewer may explore or imbue. Yet by retaining sufficient ambiguity in the marks he makes, coupled with an awareness of well-established ‘painting rules’, Chris endeavours to constantly test the mechanics of illusion in the picture making process.
