Markus Ray’s “Art Look”

THE DIVINE MOTHER We often think of God the creator as a male entity. What about God the Mother? Who is She? Most humans have come out of the womb of a mother. Who is the Divine Mother? We don’t seem to have a grasp of Her in the Western world, outside of the Virgin […]

50 SHADES OF GRAY Most of the colors we look at, if we are really honest in our account of what the eye actually sees, are 50 shades of gray. There is a drama of color that happens when a swatch of bright pigment is smattered across our field of smokey browns, silvery sages, and […]

“I want to paint like the first man.” Philip Guston At the Tyler School of Art just outside of Philadelphia from 1980-82, I studied with Stephen Greene. My teacher’s teacher was Philip Guston. Stephen Greene was my teacher, but what he gleaned from his master teacher he passed [...]

Kansas City has the best one We are in Kansas City now visiting family and are in close proximity to one of the best sculptures of Kuan Yin in the world. Like all icons of deities, its principle function is to get us in touch with the energy of the deity itself. The Kuan Yin […]

A New Work Emerges Now that I am painting again, and writing ART LOOKS, I am a much happier and well rounded human being. I had my time on the Pequod, under the thumb of my mental Captain Ahab, hobbling around on my ivory peg-leg in search of the elusive White Whale. Moby Dick is […]

ART is made in the NOW. Art is definitely made in the now. And furthermore, it is made amidst the Void of the Unknown. We artists use the “tools” of the known, with a few structures and gestures made before, and put them into a total surrender to something coming out of the apparent [...]

MY PAINTINGS OF BABAJI My obsession with painting Icons has gone on for a dozen years. Traces of it existed before, but when I married Sondra in 2009, that was the focus—the Spiritual Masters. So this became my principle subject matter. And Babaji, of course, was the Master I painted the most [...]

A Whole World Of Glory Inside 9X12 Inches of a Little Piece of Paper There is a fire of transformation that happens in a small world of one sheet of paper. Granted, that paper is made from the best French craftsman—since 1492—with 100% rag composition. I like the satin smooth kind. It gives me [...]

A TRIP TO THE “HOLY LAND” The great sequester is coming to an end—we hope. At least here in Washington it looks that way. All the political hoopla seems to have died down, and the National Gallery is open again. What a relief. Now I can get back to the business of ART LOOKING. I [...]

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, [...]