Cleve Gray

Over the course of a career spanning more than fifty years, Cleve Gray produced a prodigious, varied, and inspiring body of work that bears testimony to a brilliant and challenging mind.  Working in varied conventional and unconventional techniques including pouring, staining, and sponging, Gray often employed gestural marks and signs creating lyrical abstract compositions.
On view at Taylor Graham are 13 works including two gestural paintings from his Thrust and Considering All Possible Wolds series. Inspired by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, and in particular Zen painting, these works do not relate to anything in particular rather to the act of painting itself. At the heart of the exhibition we highlight three canvases Gray painted in Hawaii in 1970 during his Ford Foundation artist-in-residency at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. While in residence on the island of Ouahu, an during his frequent trips to the other islands with his family, Gray experienced spectacular views of waterfalls, blowholes, native plants, vines, and lava flows, all of which greatly influenced his choice of color and composition.