Description
‘riiister’ by Dusty Ray
Artist: Dusty Ray
Title: ‘riiister’
Medium: Gouache on Watercolour Paper
Dimensions: 3.75” x 3”
Framing: Wooden Frame with Metallic Finish (approx. 10” x 8”)
Year of Creation: 2018
About the Artwork:
“This piece arose from a recent fascination with chickens, roosters, their beady eyes and squishy red faces, their texture and aggressive birdly presence. I tried subtracting their eyes in an attempt to reveal the vestiges of their prehistoric ancestry. They also seem to have been subconsciously influenced by the ‘farm art’ which saturates my town, a kind of skewed version of the other art around me.” – Dusty Ray
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
I grew up in and currently live in Colorado, and the wildlife around me holds a certain sway over my subject matter. I’ve wandered through life reading, writing, drawing, and playing music…soaking in anything weird/strange/unsettling…smiling and screaming, always wanting to make stuff. Art is a catharsis for me. I try to portray the rudely animalistic, the meaty red stuff on the inside as a representation of the animal exterior. I want to distort and slice familiar beings into disfigured presentations whose distortion and violence create a sort of empathy. This does not mean that I only paint animals, I try to keep a healthy variation between my pieces, trying new techniques with each series while keeping subtle themes throughout my work. I mainly paint with gouache but have recently begun to use oils, two mediums that vary vastly in technique but which also feel very similar to me.