Rex Ray

Posted on | April 23, 2009 |

I was in Montreal with my daughter this week visiting my mother.  I sure didn’t expect to find this fantastic Rex Ray book but Montreal is a city that loves art.

I discovered Rex Ray last year when I bought a boxed set of cards produced by Chronicle Books with Rex’s art.  As you can see, it’s fantastical—great, wild, visual explorations made collage style with painted paper.  He began on a small scale and has worked up to very large-scale pieces on board.

Rex worked for a long time as a graphic designer and he thinks the boundaries between so-called ‘commercial’ and ‘fine’ art are thin.  I do too.  He points out that the more money you make in the graphics field the less creative freedom you have and this has certainly been true for me as well.  If you value creativity at all you have to branch out from graphic art in one way or another.  But it’s very, very good training—a great way to learn to think conceptually and to explore design principles.

One way I know if visual work has real interest for me is when I want to dash into the studio and get to work.  I particularly love Rex’s work because I’ve been doing my own cut-out collage pieces and also working on some abstract work.  So when I head back to the studio next week I’ll be taking my Rex Ray book with me.  By the way, he chose the name Rex Ray thirty years ago when he decided to be an artist—he must have known he was creating a whole life.

To see a short video on Rex, click here.  There are so many ways to make art and some are just pleasurable.  I think I’d feel really happy to wake up in the morning and see a Rex Ray on the wall.  Well, I already feel happy but I love how some art can lift us up like that.  Rex’s work is like that.

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