Gordon Rayner
Self Portrait #3

Name: Self Portrait #3
Brand: Gordon Rayner
Price: 10000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

During the final decade of his life, Gordon Rayner repeatedly returned to portraiture, creating stirring portraits of himself and others, including celebrated artists and his wife, Kate Regan Rayner. In the summer of 2010, the Christopher Cutts Gallery and Gordon Rayner were planning a self-portrait exhibition for the fall. Unexpectedly, Rayner passed away in September of that year, and what was to be a self-portrait show became an exhibition celebrating his career. Now, after 14 years, the show that was to be, was. “The Illustrated Man” featured 12 raw self-portraits of the artist in his final years, completed between 2001 and 2010. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue featuring an insightful essay by Canadian art critic Gary Michael Dault. In the text, Gary Michael Dault describes these evocative self-portraits as “utterly fearless in their unsparing depiction of the hitherto swashbuckling painter now brought low by age, infirmity, by raw, angry wit, and roaring resignation. He looks like an old lion — with time’s thorn relentlessly piercing him more and more deeply.”

Creator:

Gordon Rayner (1935 - 2010, Canadian)

Dimensions:

Height: 28 in (71.12 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)

Medium:

Board,Oil

Period:

2000-2009

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Toronto, CA

Reference Number:

Seller: 100161stDibs: LU2543214238202

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Gordon Rayner

As a young person, Gordon Rayner learned to paint from his father, a commercial artist and weekend painter, and from his father`s close friend, Jack Bush. He spent 17 years working in commercial art, starting with Bush's commercial art firm, Wookey, Bush and Winter. An exhibition of Painters Eleven in 1955, and especially the work of William Ronald, which he visited with his friend, artist Dennis Burton, at Toronto's Hart House Gallery (today the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Art Museum at the University of Toronto) turned him towards abstraction as did visits to the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (now called the Buffalo AKG Art Museum), to see artists such as Willem de Kooning. Under the influence of the neo-Dada movement current in Toronto in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s, Rayner began to combine found materials with his paintings. In 1966, he began a new period in his work centred around images of Magnetawan, an area 200 miles north of Toronto, north of the Muskoka District. It provided him with a favourite painting place in which he could experiment with materials and technique while demonstrating how to refer to nature without copying it in his work. To express his feelings, he used oblique references, a thick and expressionist technique, and sometimes found objects. These paintings were intuitive reinterpretations of landscapes dramatically conceived. Rayner showed his work with Toronto's Isaacs Gallery. For this reason, he has been called part of the Isaacs Group of artists, which include, among others, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland, John Meredith and Graham Coughtry. In the 1980s, his work shifted direction to a new interest in the figure. He began to reinvent this crucial subject of art for himself using dimensions of the inner, more spiritual self and obliquely explored realism in the context of the body, painting himself in inventive scenes. Some of these paintings are called the Oaxaca Suite, since Rayner lived in Oaxaca in southern Mexico in 1993 and 1994. On September 26, 2010, Gordon Rayner died suddenly at home in Toronto.