John Austin

"A Vocation Years in the Making” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, July 29, 2000.

 

Ruth Bass

DONRAY, Visual Prayer, essay for  exhibition catalogue, Klara Kohl Gallery, New York, 1998.

 

Ruth Bass                                                              

"New York? New York!” Art-Talk, Vol. XXII, Number 1, Scottsdale, Arizona, 1998.

 

Nan Coulter

“HP Goes to a Party,” Dallas Morning News, Dallas, January 23, 2000.

 

Lonnie Dubnier

The Artists Bluebook; AskART.com, 2005.

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Christopher Hightower

Essay in brochure for one-man traveling exhibition, “Luminous Confrontations”; The Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Texas, 2019.

 

Christopher Hightower

Luminous Confrontations; Essay for exhibition catalogue; One man traveling

exhibition;  Sponsored by The Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Tx 2020 (ISBN 978-0578512167) *Publication pending

 

Donald Kuspit

Donray and Expressionism, essay for exhibition catalogue, So Hyun Gallery New York, 2000.

 

Edward Lucie-Smith

Statement for exhibition catalogue, The Rivington Gallery, London 1999.

 

Dominic Luytens

Essay for exhibition catalogue, The Rivington Gallery, London, 2006.

 

Knox Martin                                                                                                           

DONRAY, A statement, Klara Kohl Gallery, New York, 1998.

 

Uncredited

Statement for exhibition catalogue, The Rivington Gallery, London 1999.

 

Harold Werner Rubin                                                                                           

Introduction to exhibition catalogue, The Rivington Gallery, London, 2006.

 

Marcus Skiersky

DONRAY, essay for exhibition brochure, V. Brooks Gallery, Dallas, 1989. (reprinted in X-POSE, Dallas).

 

Angie Summers                                                       

“Out and About in Arlington,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, January 19, 2000.

 

Vicki Thacker

“Donray, an interview”, XPOSE, Dallas, 1991., The Rivington Gallery, London 1999.

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​

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Articles By Unknown Authors and Publications with Reproductions of Essays

 

Donald Kuspit, Ruth Bass, Dominic Luytens DONRAY, A Cross Section Reprint of Essays from previous catalogues for  Exhibition Catalogue for One Man Show at Arlington Museum of Art, Arlington, Texas, 2008.

​

“Allegiance Capital Corporation Acquired Significant Collection From Rising International Artist;” Business Wire (Dallas), Yahoo Finance, Scottrade, Reuters (New York), Euroinvestor, Aplhatrade, Wir Suchen (Berlin) and others. February 26, 2009.

 

 

“Selected Works of International Artist Donray Purchased by New York Financial Services Company, Prestige Financial Center;” Reuters (New York), Business Wire (Dallas), Yahoo Finance, Market Watch (New York), Forbes (New York), and others. April 27, 2009.

 

 

“Artist’s New Series, ‘Roosters,’ Says State of the World is Nothing to Crow About;” Dallas/Fort Worth Daybook, April 7, 2009.

​

Wikipedia Article on Donray compiled over a period of time by various authors

unknown.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donray) 

 

Article on Donray; Who’s Who In American Art.  Marquis Who’s Who LLC, since 2015.

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REPRODUCTION OF CATALOGUE ESSAYS

​

 

DONRAY

Wild Things

By Dominic Lutyens*

 

Essay reprinted from DONRAY, Wild Things, exhibition catalogue

The Rivington Gallery, London, U.K. 2006

 

            “My art is about movement change and transition at all levels.”

 

Donray’s statement about his work is a neat summation of his mercurial, protean canvases in which semi-abstract human figures, mythical beasts or simply the elements are in perpetual, elusive motion.  Dynamic but ghostly swirls of paint accentuate the movement of a demonic figure swooping earthwards, say, or evoke campfire smoke around which flamenco dancers ceaselessly strut.  The mass of swirls often creates the effect of a milky miasma in which emotions are depicted as fugitive and dreamlike.  Donray’s dancing figures are metaphors for either harmony or conflict.  Possessed of a reckless passion, his restless creatures recall expressionist painter Emil Nolde’s wildly girating dancers.  (Donray says his influences include German Expressionism.)  The nocturnal settings for these scenes are ambiguous.  Donray’s cobalt blue, star speckled skies can feel glamorous, heavenly.  Yet, scarlet and fiery, they look apocalyptic.

 

Donray fuses form and content by creating canvases with physical qualities that accentuate the ambiguity of their subject matter.  Although painted in acrylics, these resemble oils thanks to their heavily, lustrous glazes and iridescent, jewel-bright colours.  But this beauty is sometimes undermined by glazes that resemble jagged shards of glass.  These, in turn, intimate violence  -  as do many of Donray’s fleeting apparitions.  Another ambiguity results from the size of the canvases against whose confines his figures strain, a reminder that all this fevered movement, though mesmerizing, is illusory. 

 

                                                                                    Dominic Lutyens*

                                                                                    February 2006

 

*Dominic Lutyens is a prominent journalist and critic in London and writes regularly for The Observer Magazine and The Independent.  He has also written articles for The Times, The Evening Standard, Design Week and DesignDesign (a publication of The Interior Design and Architecture Resource Centre in London).  He has written articles as well for The Baltic Library and Archive (a publication of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, U.K.).  He has written critical reviews for many art and design exhibitions and has also served as an expert juror for exhibitions given by Designfront04 in London.

 

 

DONRAY

By Dr. Ruth Bass*

 

Essay reprinted from DONRAY exhibition catalogue,

Klara Kohl Gallery, New York, 1998

 

 

The striking monumental paintings in Donray’s – “Visual Prayer” series are part of an impressive oeuvre.  They are a culmination – but by no means the final chapter – in his exploration of brilliant color and movement as a key to expressing human emotion.

 

For Donray, the cowboy is a modern-day Everyman whose trials, triumphs, battles and defeats are a metaphor for life and the human condition.  Thus, the rodeo paintings deal with fundamental hopes, dreams and fears; the mystery of what lies ahead; the fight to prevail against the unpredictable and uncontrollable; the ephemeral thrill of success; the joy of life; the grim finality of death; and the eternal questions about humankind’s relationship to nature and the cosmos.

 

Although each work in the series has its root in specific subject matter, what the artist “depicts” is the energy and the motion of a crucial moment.  In Bulldogger, there is at first no recognizable image: just a gigantic burst of red against a dark, mysterious space.  The crimson red in a dark ambience of deep black and pure ultramarine is further animated by yellow splotches of light that seem to burst throughout the picture space.  A motif does gradually reveal itself, its elements staying visible for only moments at a time.  The flamelike reds contain a cowboy in the act of wrestling down a steer.  But it is the dynamics of brushwork and color that evoke the urgent conflict. 

 

The paintings in this series are based, in part, on childhood memories.  Born in Houston, Donray moved with his family to several locations in Eastern and Southern Texas.  There were lots and lots of rodeos, a poster of a Mexican cowboy that his parent gave him, comic books, movies, T.V. heroes and outlaws, fictional and real.  He notes that many small Texas towns still have arenas and that cowboys still travel around from rodeo to rodeo hoping to win cash prizes and personal glory.

 

In fact, many authentic bits of Western culture show up in these works.  A wonderful silver steer horn and silver studded Spanish bridal and stirrup glitter against the dark stallion of El Vaquero.  And Happy Trails to You is an emblematic homage to Roy Rogers.

 

The rodeo, like the bullfight, may be seen as a modern ritual, distantly related to the old world religious ceremonies enacted in prehistoric caves or the myths of the minotaur.  But the skills of the rodeo rider continue to be related to a practical necessity, and the immediate aim is to conquer, not to kill.

 

The true theme of these paintings is man meeting the challenges of life – an Old Testament view of the hero that sees humans as flawed and imperfect, yet able to rise to the occasion when faced with seemingly insurmountable odds: Jacob wrestling with the angel; or Samson bringing down the temple of the Philistines. 

 

Donray has developed a method of working with acrylic paints and glaze medium that allows for complexity while creating a rare luminosity and richness of color.  Over a black and white underpainting, he builds up layer upon layer of intense hues, scumbles and glazes.  There are strokes, counter strokes, cross strokes, splotches, and splashes, and ribbonlike swirls – some visible and some swallowed up in the glowing, mysterious space.  They serve to establish form, show frenetic motion, express emotion, and create depth.  But most of all, the gorgeous color and brushwork are visual fireworks that captivate the eye.

 

In Cowboy’s Prayer, for example, we see a cowboy headed into the picture space on the back of a ferocious, flailing bull.  Whiplike lines suggest the figures with their multiple, violent movements into a deep, indefinable space.  With the bull cropped at the bottom and heading into a world of crimsons, lipstick reds, blacks and violets, there is no place for the viewer’s eye to rest, no sense of the actual setting.  Likewise, glimmering scumbles of white and yellow float near the surface or deep into the picture space, simultaneously evoking stars, meteorites, undersea creatures, atoms, fires, explosions.

 

Because Donray’s paintings are so personal, the artistic influences are not immediately apparent.  He cites paintings of the French Romantics with their exotic subjects and whirling, heroic action.  There is an affinity with the German Expressionists, with Kandinsky’s early landscapes, and with the violently skewed images of Chaim Soutine.  The power, strength, and monumentality of David Alfaro Siqueiros; Boccioni’s repetitive form; Van Gogh’s and Gauguin’s arbitrary uses of color; and Georgia O’Keefe’s sensuous, undulating line have also been sources of inspiration.

 

Even more important perhaps, are the musical and literary influences.  His works may echo the drama and emotion found in Mozart, Wagner or Rachmaninoff.  He has read the Cormac McCarthy novels in which dangerous situations and dark violence contrast with the beauty of the landscapes in which they are set.  But he is equally moved by the poignant longings for the unattainable found in Vladimir Nabakov’s fictions.

 

In his hallucinatory still lifes, interiors, and landscapes of the early 90s, Donray perfected the saturated color, violently twisted lines, and emotive distortions of form and space that inform his current work.  Then he went though an anguished “black” period in which prismatic color all but disappeared and pictorial space became even more disengaged from the space of everyday experience.

 

In the current work, it is feeling rather than form that ultimately prevails.  In the rodeo paintings, and in paintings inspired by Spanish dancers or literary classics, the blacks work with the vivid chromatic colors to create a mysterious, galvanized atmosphere that is at once physical, emotional, and special.  These are paintings about loneliness, exhilaration, energy and passion.

 

                                                                                    Ruth Bass*

                                                                                    New York, 1998

 

*Dr. Ruth Bass is an art critic in New York and  was an editorial associate for ArtNews and the New York correspondent of Art-Talk.  She has been the author of many essays, reviews and articles in gallery catalogs and art publications including the Grove Dictionary of Art, Marlborough Gallery, Gallery Henoch, and the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Art.

 

 

DONRAY’S EXPRESSIONISM

By Donald B. Kuspit*

 

Essay reprinted from DONRAY exhibition catalogue,

So Hyun Gallery, New York, October, 2000

 

There is a verve, an energy, a dynamic surging gesture, violent movement, an overall vividness and vitality – that places Donray’s paintings among the most interesting of what might be called post-modern expressionist painting.  At the same time, Donray’s imagery has a strong surrealist resonance:  his uncanny, altogether bizarre animals – all of them seem predatory and ghostly – seem to emerge straight from the unconscious.  In other words, Donray’s paintings are best described as expressionistic dream pictures.  Dream Becomes Reality, as the title of one tells us and Donray’s dreams seem to be real nightmares.

 

His dream pictures are quite startling indeed, haunting, especially when the creatures they depict seem to embody their gestural power – concentrate it in their fury.  The vicious creature, teeth fiercely barred in a generally aggressive face, at the center of the superb Winter Kill made an immediate impact on my psyche.  It is still vivid in my memory, as though it was a horrible dream of my own – a threat emanating from myself expressing my own repressed hostility.

 

But there is more to Donray’s paintings than expressive power and urgent emotion, conveyed by dancing gesture and headlong color.  There is also great skill in rendering the skill of rodeo riders.  The Horseman on Fire is not only on fire with energy but “on fire” in the sense of being filled with enthusiasm for his task.  He is self-possessed and in control of his wild horse, bringing it under the sway of his ego in the process of making its energy his own.  Indeed, Donray’s process paintings – they have become all the more explicitly a matter of process in the recent smaller works, which mix collage with paint to create a feeling of very fresh texture, at once raw and refined – suggest the process of mastery of a difficult rode task.  It is essentially a test of skill and strength ritualistically repeating man’s mastery of animals, symbolic of his mastery of the animal in himself.  Both kinds of mystery are the basis of civilization.

 

Donray, a Texan has said that the rodeo is a metaphor for life, to which one might add for the mastery and shaping of the life force.  And the death force.  For there is an aura of death – the threat of death – in Donray’s painting, as The Magic Fire and The Durango Kid with their ominous darkness, make clear.  The rider can always be thrown from his horse and trampled to death by it.  The Bulldogger seems to be falling to his flaming death – the bull is an ancient symbol of the threat and power of death, as bullfighting indicates – like a kind of Icarus in a dark sky.  It throws his Promethean accomplishment – the stealing of fire from the gods, and subsequent punishment – into relief.  He is a phoenix-like figure, integrating in his person the life instincts and death instincts, and thus showing the strength of his ego.  Donray has mythologized him into a symbol of the extremes of existence, between which we are all but crushed.  Indeed, there is a sense of crushing as well as elated force in Donray’s convulsive paintings.

 

I myself think that the rodeo is a metaphor for the creative process, which begins with the mastery of the material medium – wrestling with it until it bends to one-s will – and ends with the expressive grandeur of the work of art.  I think Donray’s paintings celebrate his own stormy, fervent creativity – his own mastery of painterliness, which has allowed him to convince us that we are in the pressure of primordial force.  We seem to be witnesses the volcanic eruption of a titanic underworld.  Donray puts us as close as it is possible to get to the magma of the psyche without getting burned, although we feel the heat.

           

 

*Donald B. Kuspit is a well known critic and teaches at the State University of New York (Stonybrook) and is the author of numerous art books including:

 

 The End of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2005

 

 Redeeming Art:  Critical Reveries (Asthetics Today), Allworth Press, 2000

 

 The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 

Chilhuly, Harry N. Abrams, 1997.

 

 Karel Appel Sculpture: A Catalogue Raisonne.  Harry N. Abrams, 1994

 

 

 

STATEMENTS ABOUT

THE WORK OF DONRAY

 

 

“Painting in the tradition of the consummate artist.  Work that is figurative, abstract and American.  An exhibition to see and enjoy….. The paintings demonstrate an inverted approach; gentle and focused at the same time being super-macho and withdrawn.  Viewers are invited to draw near but not to intrude on the artist’s thoughts…”

 

                                                                        Edward Lucie Smith*

                                                                        Reprinted from exhibition catalogue,

                                                                        DONRAY, AMERICAN PAINTER

                                                                        NEW YORK/TEXAS, The Rivington

                                                                        Gallery, London, 1999

 

*Edward Lucie Smith is a prominent international art critic living in London.  He has written numerous art books.

 

 

 

“These strong, vibrant, semi-abstract, figurative paintings in near violent colours could only be ones that reflect the country they represent.  They depict city stress coupled with elements of cowboys, native Americans and the limitless horizon.  One senses that the lore and the music of this background are the strong elements in his bright and lyrical art.

 

                                                                        Harold W. Rubin*

                                                                        Reprinted from exhibition catalogue,

                                                                        DONRAY, AMERICAN PAINTER

                                                                        NEW YORK/TEXAS, The Rivington

                                                                        Gallery, London, 1999

 

*Harold W. Rubin is an art dealer in London and owner of The Rivington Gallery representing DONRAY in Europe.

 

 

 

“The works of Donray have, as a central vibration, major rhymes of his physiognomy that are like dashes of pique reflecting off encounters of the wondrous with excitement in hustling technique that is masterfully appropriate for his motif of luminous and vertiginous confrontations.  What a rush!”

 

                                                                        Knox Martin*

                                                                        Reprinted from a brochure on the works

                                                                        DONRAY

 

*Knox Martin is a well known artist living and working in New York.  He has been categorized with the second generation of abstract expressionists and was represented by the Charles Egan Gallery in the 1950s along with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.  He taught at Yale University for more than six years and currently is an instructor and lecturer at the Art Students League of New York.