Markus Ray’s “Art Look”

Florence’s Magnificent Hour I watched the Netflix series on the Medici. They were the prominent merchant and banking family in Fifteenth Century Florence who for four generations funded and supported the arts that we now call the Renaissance, or “Rebirth.” Donatello, [...]

Holy Gestures Upon A Sacred Space There is a yearning in some of us to simply make marks. It is more than just an urge to doodle, but some drive of the hand to take up a brush, or a stick, or a stylus and scratch some small bit of our destiny onto a surface. […]

FRIDA KAHLO’S VISION I always loved the paintings of Frida Kahlo. We all know her story—a trolly car accident early in her life left her body in a state of brokenness. She probably painted to not go insane from the pain, and she happened to be good at it. Frida met and married Diego [...]

Reverence for Mother Nature’s Monkeys It seems that we have to look toward cultures not our own to find a reverence for Mother Nature that transcends the need to conquer or exploit it. Such a culture exists in Bali. We go there every year in December, and take a group on the Bali Quest. [...]

WILLIAM BLAKE CONNECTED TO THE MYSTERIES William Blake was trained as a Journeyman Engraver in the 1770s. Mind you, this was the age before photography. And the printing arts—engraving, etching, woodcuts were the main ways of reproducing an image in books, newspapers, etc. Lithography was [...]

A Divine Place in The Middle of the Bay Of Mumbai Maybe you have been there. Maybe not. It seems like a remote place, out on an island in the middle of the Bay of Mumbai, cut into the side of a mountain out of solid rock 1200 years ago—perhaps more. ELEPHANTA is a classic Indian […]

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 [...]