Roxie Ray’s paintings depict moments where field-workers toil, and swimmers immerse themselves in water, colliding with light and shadow. Each work alludes to an underlying socio-political subtext, as realistic images of everyday existence evoke ambiguous situations where the human figure is both anonymous yet strangely familiar, powerful yet marginalized.

Ray is a Southern California native raised in an era of undeveloped coastal hills and fields next to the Pacific Ocean. “My desire to create arises out of a need to escape my own ordinariness, to merge with something greater and more sublime than myself,” she reflects. Painting is not an easy activity, but a slow process in which Ray creates atmosphere by bringing motion and contrast to an idea. My paintings are “metaphorical statements of human emotions and passions, which are often initially submerged and unconscious. It’s only through the act of creativity that I often become fully conscious of their meaning. Painting is meditative for this very reason.”

Roxie Ray is a founding member of Studio Channel Islands Art Center and is dedicated to helping establish a major cooperative art facility and presentation gallery in Ventura County. For more information, please contact the artist at (805) 383-1368 or visit her website www.roxieray.com