Owen Gray: Strange New World

by Robert Sievert

Owen Gray's work is a vision of a surface. He paints an overview of a floating world filled with boats, pods, insects of giant size -- as a matter of fact Gray really has no use for day to day proportion, things of highly different magnitude are juxtaposed in a world that seems to thrive on overcrowding and pushing things aside to take their place in an intense arena.

His present work has evolved from the expressionistic or apocalyptic landscape he accomplished in the past. Somehow this has led him to his new vision that might be a metaphor for our own natural environment that has gone wild. Certainly this work is a call from the wild first dreamt of by Théodore Rousseau. Tigers and snakes populate this undulating surface that one can almost feel bobbing and heaving.

As well this vision has afforded him a very lush painting style in which riches are built up of painterly strokes over laying each other into a Monet-like surface as color rebounds and echoes from within and from underneath. His flattened shapes and spatial savvy betray a modernistic training. There are few painters around that can match Gray's painterly skills, one that brings a painterly vision to so complete a conclusion. Gray's work is visionistic, complete and done in the highest of contemporary painting styles.