Ray Donley

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.

The subjects of my fictional portraits are the 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/introspective states, I seek above all to create a non-narrative art that, while seemingly possessing a Renaissance or Baroque pedigree, is itself rich with its own mythic and symbolic potential.