Danna Ray

Waking up after camping, when the morning is brand new and full of the kind of light that you can't experience at any other time of day is one of the best things you can experience. It's nice to feel excited about being awake at 7:00 in the morning, to stretch out into the cold and wrap your jacket and scarf around yourself, to feel that the ground has straightened your spine after months of sleeping on a mattress, to zip open the door of your tent, if you have one, and look out and see mountains a thousand times taller than you...that is when you know life is great. How lucky are we to live on a planet that happens to have mountains and trees and rivers and clean air and tufted eared squirrels? Danna Ray's painting, Morning, reminded me instantly of that feeling...even though her painting is a little more misty than sun dappled, it made me want to ditch everything and head out west.

I love any artwork that combines some kind of element of human existance with nature, whether it's ancient architecture being overgrown by a jungle, sculptures like Yoko Ono's Wishing Trees, or gauche and pastel paintings like Dana's. Recently I've been really interested, especially, in melding modern man-made things with nature...what is nature? what is artificial? are humans part of nature shaping itself, or are we seperate? Dana's painting, Departures, brings up a lot of those themes. The suitcase with the constellations is a manmade object, but looks like part of the sky sitting on the ground...at the same time constellations, rather than stars, are a human construct. In any case I love the idea of a bus stop bench in the woods. Do these chairs and the suitcase represent traveling between the natural world and the man-made world...or between nature in it's purest sense and the myths we create about it?

I really like Dana's painting of a girl crossing a log too...it reminds me of when I was little and used to run through the forest, jumping over gullies, crossing logs, and hoping across rocks in streams. When I was little I could ruuuuuuun(!) while doing all of those things. Now, I have to be more careful, maybe because I'm not doing it as often, maybe because my center of gravity is higher, or maybe just because kids still contain an element of wildness that I think lets them move through the forest like squirrels.

Dana Ray studied illustration at Virginia Commonwealth University (Probably the best art school in Virginia). In her work she is exploring "the inherent transience and connectedness of all things." You can check out more of her work at her website, and you can buy her work at her online shop. 

P.S. I love her postcards as well as her paintings. I think it's interesting that my generation is taking up postcards with projects like Post Secret and The Post Card Exchange. I think it's an attempt to feel something solid and real, instead of virtual, but the postcard, rather than a letter, fits with our generation's visual and high speed/sound blip/you tube clip kind of nature. A postcard is fast, and half of it is an image, unlike a letter that just takes too long. And with that, I'll stop writing.