Inna Jane Ray

About Inna Ray’s Paintings

Inna Ray on her Watercolor and Color Pencil Technique

Quick readjustment of perception about my "watercolor paintings" -- most of the works I've done out here on paper are not true watercolors, which is a beautiful and demanding medium at which I have no competence. I use watercolor as crude underpainting for overdrawing in Prismacolor waxy pencils. I use my colored pencils in a rather more brutal way than most pencil drawers do--I sort of paint with them, heavy coverage at times. Then I put back in smudged highlights with the opaque watercolor, gouache, which doesn't stick perfectly to the waxy pencil. Then I spray the whole mess with a resin-based clear coat that acts like a glue-net and brings up the contrast.  A nifty method derived entirely from limitation of circumstance -- I invented this process in January of 2011 while living in my dinky vintage trailer parked in aging, vacant Independence Creek Campground. I had: dried-up tubes of WinsorNewton watercolor, box of color pencils, half-used tablet of watercolor paper; too broke to buy anything new, and nothing else to do. Snowing outside. A new “technique” was born!  
Eastern Sierra and Point Pinole paintings are all watercolor, color pencil, and gouache on watercolor paper. Most are 12" x 16", some to 9" x 12."  Owls and Horses are similar sizes, on paper, mixed media including acrylics. 

Eastern Sierra Paintings

Inna Ray on her Eastern Sierra paintings

Paintings from the Eastern Sierra in California, principally from the watershed of Owens Valley. I am most inspired by the landscape and colors of winter, when underlying structures of  fields and thickets, streams and canals, and riparian trees, particularly cottonwoods, red birch and willow, are starkly exposed. My development of a style based on strong graphic linework over watercolor underpainting is well suited to the muted colors and leafless dormancy of natural survival in an arid land. Although it appears bleak, I am drawn to its quiet power of waiting for monsoon rain or snow melt waters for a renewal of life.

I feel that while I paint real things in the world, my paintings are more expressive than naturalistic; I am using tree trunks, pools, valley vistas, owls and horses as vehicles to convey feelings that arise within myself while contemplating them. I am painting the truth of my experience as well as perception of my subject, and the meaning I am expressing through my painting is distilled from wider experience than the local subjects which inspire me to paint.

I hope that my vision of water in the Eastern Sierra, most of which is shipped to Los Angeles after it flows down out of the mountains, will contribute to an awareness of the need to appreciate, protect and restore riparian woodlands in California, and everywhere else.

Point Pinole Paintings; California Coastal Grasslands

Inna Ray on her Point Pinole paintings

Late afternoon light flaring in the oat grass along the coastal regions. Most are based on photographs taken in the San Francisco Bayside park named Pt. Pinole, site of a black powder dynamite factory undergoing reclamation as a county park.

Inna Ray on her small paintings: Rusty Tin Cansters and the Lanterns:

Tin Cansters are whimsical portraits of characters my imagination sees in rusty old cans picked up in old dumps in the Eastern Sierra. The Rusty Tin Cansters are acrylic on 5" x 7" cradled board, or 6" x 8" watercolor paper.  

The Lanterns appear on the page as I am painting them. I suppose they are all about light in the darkness. The Lanterns are watercolor on 6" x 8" watercolor paper.