Markus Ray’s “Art Look”

The Male / Female Paradigm in Art It is an area that interests me in painting, namely my painting―SACRED SEXUALITY. And this amounts in my world to the Male / Female Paradigm in Art. It is also the God / Goddess unification of our notion of Divine Order: there is a sacred masculine as well […]

Who Has Mastered Green? I was in graduate school at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia (actually Elkins Park, a northern suburb of Philadelphia) when I met Roger Anliker, a long time professor of Painting and Drawing at Tyler. This was 1981. I met him because I was teaching a drawing class, [...]

THE GAMUT OF THE HUMAN SPECTRUM The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is truly a Great Museum. I blundered into this video on YouTube, one in a series called GREAT MUSEUMS. I saw it was about the Metropolitan Museum in New York, so I thought I would take a fast perusal. Before […]

A PAINTER’S LIFE : HANDS Hands communicate a lot. Almost more than a face, sometimes. Do you love your hands? Imagine yourself without them and I think you know what I mean. They are essential. They are your contact with the world. Outside of sight itself, hands are probably the most [...]

A PAINTER’S LIFE; OUT ON THE EDGE OF NEW DISCOVERY One who is out on the edge of new discovery is often facing the fine line between sanity and insanity. This would have to be so. Conventional thought is often the standard of measuring sanity, and that can be more often than we would like [...]

THE BARCELONA INFLUENCE Few Architects had such a Divine Connection as Antonio Gaudi. His architecture, especially Parc Güell, had an essential impact on my vision of art and art-making. It may sound crazy, but Gaudi helped me understand Jackson Pollock’s Paintings. Pollock discovered [...]

A Painter’s Life; Four Decades I am writing another book. But this time it’s about art. My art. Perhaps you could call it an autobiography. All art is autobiographical in the end. Every gesture of expression has the imprint of the soul whose stroke swooshed it through the cosmos all [...]

THE POWER OF COLOR Painters are to the window of the pictorial world as God is to the great Void of the Cosmos. They wield color like God spins worlds and galaxies into play. There is a notion of unlimited possibilities to be conjured upon the canvas just as there are massive constellations [...]

ON THIS RESURRECTION DAY It is Paradise we want here. Joy is it. We ask for well-being beyond belief, nothing short of Heaven on Earth. Art is only that, even if it is gathering up all the rambunctious elements of materials and life and drama and some kind of tumultuous outpouring of beauty, or [...]

The Art of Joy There is a JOY that comes from painting something. Anything. For me, just making marks of color on a surface is something of the ecstatic. Perhaps it derives from memories of doing this so many times in other lives before this one. Perhaps it is from my family’s tendency to [...]