Alan Ray is a classically-trained fine artist based in Toronto, Canada, with a passion for portraiture and still life. He works primarily in oils using traditional methods and, in the interest of conservation, he seeks out the best supports, grounds and paints he can find for his work.
Alan Ray was born in Waterloo, Ontario, and studied art in high school with well-known Waterloo region artist Barry McCarthy before pursuing degrees in political science and international relations. With a Commonwealth Scholarship, he earned a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London, England in 1994 on the subject of military intervention and peacekeeping. He left academia to work in a number of fields: software development, technical writing, animation, multimedia production and most recently corporate e-learning and learning management. In 1998, Ray became a co-founder of a consulting firm that became Prospero Learning Solutions, a Canadian custom training design and development firm. It was bought by global training giant GP Strategies in June 2013. Alan Ray retired from the industry in June 2015 to devote myself to painting full-time.
Art and art history are his true lifelong passions. He participated in his first professional group exhibition in Waterloo in 1983 at age 19 with a series of watercolour paintings of antique cars. Throughout university, commissioned portraits and watercolours helped to subsidize Ray’s studies.
In April 2004, he resumed formal art training by studying part-time at the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto. While there, Alan Ray worked under the guidance of artists Fernando Freitas, Juan Martinez, Ryan Gauvin, and, for a short time, David Gluck and Matthew Mancini. He completed the curriculum in the spring of 2013 and graduated in September, 2013.
Ray paints daily in my studios in downtown Toronto, in Haliburton (cottage country) and Key West Florida. Portraiture, figures, and still life are among my favourite subjects to paint. An avid plein air painter, he travels with his French easel or pochade box wherever he goes.
Ray is a member of the Portrait Society of America, the Oil Painters of America, the International Guild of Realism, the Don Valley Art Club, and the Arts Council Haliburton Highlands. He is also a founding member of the Get Real Artists group, a guild of Canadian professional artists who paint in the style of classical realism.
Alan Ray is available for commissions and private art instruction.
More information about Alan Douglas Ray can be found on his website www.alandouglasray.com