November Spotlight - Dusty Ray

Our Spotlight artist for the month of November is an artist whose real preoccupation is the darker mysteries of life, border lining on the spiritual, yet mystic he is not. He is a philosopher whose dialectic is the flesh of his subjects; his discourse is the vivisection of said flesh and its restructuring. This is the cut-up technique taken to the extreme, and within the world he creates within the parameters of his canvas one is forced to confront the beauty and vulnerability of not just flesh, but meat; those loose shiny sinews, and dark, wet cavities. In doing so he also forces our eyes to turn towards the beauty and vulnerability of our own fleshy vessels, and it is within the act of making us look inward that he draws us into confronting the existential horror of our own existence. There is no reprieve from such horror, only moments of respite. But perhaps Lovecraft summed up this month’s Spotlight best when he wrote “Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.”  This month we are proud to present for your enjoyment and edification the art of our November Spotlight: Dusty Ray.

​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 horridly disfigured presentations whose distortion and violence create a sort of empathy.

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Dusty Ray

​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 horridly 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.  

See more of Dusty's work at
www.etsy.com/shop/DustyRayPaints
​@sloppjockey_ert