"Ray Robinson’s paintings are like fire, both illuminating the viewer’s consciousness and consuming the panels in monoliths of death. Like fire, the figures and landscapes have form and do not have a form. The figures take on the exact physical likeness of the surrounding natural environment. The same brushstroke and texture that paints the earth and bonfire is the same stroke that depicts the priestess’ figure. The monoliths that hang from gallows and rise from pyres are identical to those figures conducting rituals. The moment the viewer realizes one element, they are introduced to its opposite. This dualism is further visualized by the black and white pigment transformed into an intermediate gray. Robinson contains the composition by grounding the figures within a compacted space. Elements are pushed together, creating density. However, like fire enveloping a solid form, that concentration of heat dissolves into the ether."
Ian Christopher Lutz
excerpted from "The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine" published at Riot Material, January 2022
The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland and Stephen Romano Gallery in Brooklyn are thrilled to present the first exhibition of British artist RAY ROBINSON's series "THE THIRD DOOR"
The exhibition will open November 17th 2021 and continue through January 15 2022.
In this exhibition of paintings produced between 2015 and 2016, the artist confronts his native England's often difficult - and contentious history with witchcraft. While selections from the series were previously included in group exhibition curated by Stephen Romano, this is the first exhibition devoted to the entire series. A catalog with contributions fromIan Christopher Lutz Alfred Rosenbluth, Charlotte Rodgers and Steven Intermill will accompany the exhibition, and is available without cost as a digital download at archive.org.
Ray Robinson was born in the UK in 1931 and began his professional career as a mathematician. Seeking a significant change of course in his life in his late 20's, Ray discovered the works of David Bomberg, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Cezanne. He was heavily impacted by their attempts to create a visually ordered perceptual space within their works, as well as seeking to create a visual immediacy through truth to materials. This set Ray off on a path of working directly from the model, which he continues to do to this day, living in seclusion with his wife Brenda in Nova Scotia. While his works are most often straightforwardly figurative—landscape or still life--this body of work is the exceptional, delving into dark corners such as witch burnings and hangings, demonic apparitions, paranormal visions, occult rituals, and the old religion. Ray Robinson's affinity to these subjects germinates from him spending his summers as a young boy with his grandmother, who apprenticed him in the old ways of the witch.
In the early 1960's, Ray was accepted as a student at the esteemed SLADE School of Fine Art in London under the tutelage of sculptor Reg Butler, where he befriended and exhibited alongside many of the major British artists of the 1960's such as David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, Henry Moore, and others. Fellows Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also followers of David Bomberg, and Ray Robinson, were at the forefront of a revival of the pendulum of taste swinging back toward painting as beauty for beauty's own sake.
Due to his controversial teaching methods being challenged, and a subsequent rebellion by his faithful students at Bath Academy, Ray decided to make a move across the Atlantic. He began teaching art in London Ontario, and later at a community college in Sarnia, Ontario, a small city which borders the US just north of Detroit. This is where the exhibition curator first met the artist when he was 19 years old and continues to hold a lifelong apprenticeship on Art, Life and Magic with him.
The artist has spoken only occasionally of this immersive body of work, which is shrouded in mystery and atmosphere, leaving the viewer the freedom to bring their own subjective experience to his art, and experience the narratives not only within the historical contexts they are situated, but also within the broader context of how the esoteric awakens their own sense of grander aspirational possibilities. It is an essential aspect to a greater appreciation of the art of Ray Robinson, that one feels the immediacy of the medium, and allows that primal sensory experience to transport us into the cinematic space the artist creates for us. Thus, the artist’s role becomes a shamanic one, and the art itself is a social healing device.
The thread of continuity which anchors this series of paintings with Ray Robinson's entire oeuvre is at its core--is drawing, in this instance with paint, "colored mud" as Robinson calls it. This perpetuates the legacy of the grand tradition of artists who preceded him, such as Cezanne, Chiam Soutine, Alberto Giacometti, Willem De Kooning and David Bomberg.
Ray Robinson has said of "The Third Door":
Witches? Poor Devils
Each of the paintings has a true circumstance…and the result of my ‘being there’ and so pass through the matrix of memory and through the archetype that defined the first vision and set our Parameters.. To an inner meaning without external references.
‘When reason sleeps in the minds of the wise Witches burn and demons rise’
THE ART OF RAY ROBINSON: THE THIRD DOOR by Charlotte Rodgers, October 6 2016
"The Day the Witch Lya Burchett was Given Short Shift and Hanged. Her Body Burned in the Grounds of Dolbadarn Castle" 2015 - Acrylic on Board 26 x 32 inches
"When Witches Burn and Demons Rise" 2015 - Acrylic on Board 26 x 32 inches
Ray Robinson - "Witch and her Dog Execurted on the Same Day" (Dog was shown Mercy and was Stragled before Burned) 2015 24 wide x 32 inches high
RECENT PRESS
The Brush as Luminous Torch: Ray Robinson’s Blazing Portals Into the Divine Feminine
JANUARY 6, 2022 BY CHRISTOPHER LUTZ
The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January)
The Third Door: The Works of Ray Robinson at Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick
By ALFRED ROSENBLUTH, January 2022
The Third Door:Occult Works of Ray Robinson, at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magic (through 15 January)
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