Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Canadian, 1935-2010
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.(Biography provided by Christopher Cutts Gallery)
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Artist: Gordon Rayner
Raising Cane (self portrait)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
2010s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Self Portrait #3
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Board, Oil
Country Bath (self portrait)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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 i...
Category
1990s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Canvas, Acrylic
Self Portrait
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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 i...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Up, on the Roof (self portrait #2)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Sunday in the Park (self portrait #12)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Sea Roof (self portrait #6)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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 i...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
In the Playpen (self portrait #11)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Untitled (self portrait)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Look (self portrait)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
2010s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Hangover (self portrait)
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
2010s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
Self Portrait #5
By Gordon Rayner
Located in Toronto, CA
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, K...
Category
Early 2000s Gordon Rayner Portrait Paintings
Materials
Oil, Board
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