STATEMENT

She grew up in a small village in Wales, where daily conversation was full of comments on changing skies, direction of wind, and behavior of the birds and animals living around her. Thus, the dark granite mountains and windswept sea, flocks of circling ravens, and wild ponies, became primary to her early visual vocabulary.

Ray came to California in 1967, after graduating with Honors in Fine Art from the University of Manchester. Young, and still unformed as an artist, she was non-the-less quickly assimilated into the Los Angeles gallery scene. Four years later, Ray left the city for a more solitary life in the Santa Cruz mountains, establishing her studio in a wild area of Bonny Doon, where she has lived and worked ever since.

The discovery of mono-type printing in the early nineties catalyzed a breakthrough in her painting process. Painting on a plate, rather than directly on paper or canvas, freed her from a deliberateness she felt had begun to hamper spontaneity in her work. Ray found the marriage of painted plate and printing press kept her open to possibility. Gesture and expression came easily working on the smooth surface, and unanticipated texture and surprise "accidents" gave the work fresh vitality.

Ray discovered that torn paper chine colléd to the mono-type added an abstract element that gave more scope of expression. Furthermore, as someone who has more imagery in mind than she has time to paint, the momentum of working in mono-type suited her temperament: an idea could be initially expressed rapidly through mono-type, then developed further with other media, to give the piece more substance and "hand".

Though much of Ray's work is informed by her resonance with nature, in the last few years she has become aware that the imagery of her work springs either from her roots in rural Wales, or from the natural world around her here in California. And now these often integrate in a single painting, suggesting a deeper coalescence of her two cultures. For instance, the American coyote emerged as an icon of the peripheral self-reliance once suggested by the wild ponies of Wales. However, the coyote may be seen in a landscape where a weathered blackthorn stands as icon of her Welsh origins.