I\u00a0was born in Hammersmith in 1952 and my family moved to South Harrow around 1958.<\/p>\n
Upon leaving secondary modern school in 1969, I enrolled as a full-time student in Foundation Studies at Harrow School of Art where I gained a Certificate in Foundation Studies.<\/p>\n
From 1971-1974 I studied painting at Canterbury College of Art in Kent, where I gained\u00a0a Dip. A.D. in Fine Art (Painting).<\/p>\n
After leaving art college I drifted away from fine art. I worked in several manual jobs until the mid nineteen-eighties when I began working as a layout artist, designing pages for a nationally distributed retail catalogue. I continued in that line of work until November 2014, when I decided to take early retirement \u00a0in order to concentrate on painting.<\/p>\n
Most of my student work at Canterbury had been abstract\/non-representational. However, when my interest in art was rekindled in the late nineteen-eighties, I tended towards a more figurative style and worked mostly in pencil, colour pencil and watercolour, to draw still-life and surrealistic landscapes.<\/p>\n
I became a member of The Society for Art of the Imagination between 2002 to 2007, being represented in four of their annual exhibitions over that period. I also exhibited drawings in two open exhibitions, held in 2005 and 2006, at the Royal Society of Birmingham Artists gallery.<\/p>\n
I began to feel dissatisfied with the figurative work I was producing. I felt the sense of mystery I was trying to evoke could be achieved in a better and more direct way through non-representational paintings, which do not have the ‘literary’ distraction of representational pictures. My work became almost exclusively non-representational.<\/span><\/p>\n I exhibited seven of my non-representational paintings at Bromley Arts Council Ripley Arts Centre in Bromley from 9th January to 4th February 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n While I continue my non-representational work, I have recently re-evaluated my opinion about the validity of my earlier representational paintings, and have started to produce figurative work again. <\/span><\/p>\n In these recent figurative paintings and drawings, I portray objects or people in slightly unusual, quirky or unexpected situations, which may encourage the viewer not to take the common-place for granted.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u00a0was born in Hammersmith in 1952 and my family moved to South Harrow around 1958. Upon leaving secondary modern school in 1969, I enrolled as a full-time student in Foundation Studies at Harrow School of Art where I gained a Certificate in Foundation Studies. From 1971-1974 I studied painting at Canterbury College of Art in … Continue reading Biography<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"spay_email":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/117"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":410,"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/117\/revisions\/410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.douglasvictorgrayart.me.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}