Alan Bray Art
American, b. 1946
Alan Bray was born in Waterville, Maine, on January 12, 1946, but he grew up in Monson, a small slate-quarrying town set in the northern reaches of the Appalachians. It was here, hiking and camping with liked-minded childhood friends, that he began to exercise his natural inquisitiveness as a tool for building woods-craft. In these rugged foothills, ever alive with the turning of the seasons yet always plainly bearing the imprint of eons-old geologic upheaval, Bray learned to find his way around in a world of enigmatic signs and divergent trails. Unwittingly, before ever picking up a brush, he developed the sensibilities of a landscape painter by developing sensitivities to the relationships between the living and the ancient land on which life depends.
Later, when Bray decided to study art formally, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Boston, where he first felt the appeal of image-making as a way of understanding the world. Three years of studio work revealed the need for a more traditional approach to the discipline of painting, one informed by the broader range of a liberal education, a revelation that prompted Bray to enroll at the University of Southern Maine, from which he graduated in 1971. While this education was in many ways a success – particularly in the way it engendered literacies in fields outside the fine arts – it was nevertheless incomplete: well-prepared now for the next leg of the journey, Bray traveled to Florence to study at Villa Schifanoia Graduate School of Fine Arts.
Villa Schifanoia, Florence, the Italian Renaissance held many treasures and gave freely to a painter who was now mature enough in his art to receive them. Including a new medium and a new physical structure for his paintings –tempera on panel. The technical challenges of this medium, the necessary adjustments in craft, and the limitations of scale favored, and inspired, someone of a practical as well as a visionary intelligence.
Bray paints in casein, a milk-based tempera that has virtually no drying time. Necessarily, his paintings are technically complex because they consist of thousands of tiny brush strokes, built up in layers, out of which the images – the vision – advance from the foundation of a mirror-smooth, absolute void of white ground. It is a method of painting that follows directly from his method of exploring his subjects.(Biography provided by Garvey|Simon)
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Artist: Alan Bray
Alan Bray, Windblown, 2023, impressionist casein nature nest painting
By Alan Bray
Located in New York, NY
The latest painting from Alan Bray is a rare and exotic sighting, indeed. He’s shifted his focus away from the human realm and up to the skies, capturing an empty bird’s nest camoufl...
Category
2010s American Impressionist Alan Bray Art
Materials
Casein, Panel
Alan Bray, Nest in a Nest, 2023, impressionist casein nature nest painting
By Alan Bray
Located in New York, NY
The latest painting from Alan Bray is a rare and exotic sighting, indeed. He’s shifted his focus away from the human realm and up to the skies, capturing an empty bird’s nest camoufl...
Category
2010s American Impressionist Alan Bray Art
Materials
Casein, Panel
Hermit Thrush, impressionist casein nature painting
By Alan Bray
Located in New York, NY
A narrative from the artist:
"It belonged to a Hermit Thrush, which has one of the most beautiful songs in all of nature. Give it a listen on Audubon. A...
Category
2010s American Impressionist Alan Bray Art
Materials
Casein, Panel
Clearing Off, contemporary Impressionist casein landscape painting
By Alan Bray
Located in New York, NY
Alan Bray’s landscape paintings of his native, central Maine explore the ever-ebbing dynamic between nature and humanity. His paintings capture an asymmetrical pas de deux. Painted with uncompromising precision by his quick-drying casein tempera paint, Bray’s trailheads, shorelines, and vast horizons show evidence of previous human presence as it succumbs to natural growth.
Bray’s stylized scenes center on these afterimages of human interference as well as other natural phenomena. Inundated with detail, nature reclaims swaths of scarred land, fallen trees, and dilapidated structures, returning them to their wild form. Natural phenomena such as wild overgrowth, animal tracks, mysterious forms, bogs, and mist are resplendently captured as homage to the rugged and uninhabited corners of secluded Maine.
Alan Bray builds his landscapes with numerous layers of quick-drying casein tempera. Often used in Italian Renaissance painting...
Category
2010s American Impressionist Alan Bray Art
Materials
Panel, Casein
A Rise, blue and green casein on panel impressionist waterscape painting, 2004
By Alan Bray
Located in New York, NY
Bray has explored a smaller, more demure 8.5 x 11 inch format for two of these casein on panel paintings. When coupled with his rich palette and tightly hatched bed of brushstrokes, ...
Category
2010s American Impressionist Alan Bray Art
Materials
Casein
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Artist and teacher, Charles ("Charlie") Bunnell worked in a variety of styles throughout his career because as an artist he believed, "I’ve got to paint a thousand different ways. I don’t paint any one way." At different times he did representational landscapes while concurrently involved with semi- or completely abstract imagery. He was one of a relatively small number of artists in Colorado successfully incorporating into their work the new trends emanating from New York and Europe after World War II. During his lifetime he generally did not attract a great deal of critical attention from museums, critics and academia. However, he personally experienced a highpoint in his career when Katherine Kuh, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, personally chose one of his paintings - Why? - for its large exhibition of several hundred examples of abstract and surrealist art held in 1947-48, subsequently including it among the fifty pieces selected for a traveling show to ten other American museums.
An only child, Bunnell developed his love of art at a young age through frequent drawing and political cartooning. In high school he was interested in baseball and golf and also was the tennis champion for Westport High School in Kansas City. Following graduation, his father moved the family to Denver, Colorado, in 1916 for a better-paying bookkeeping job, before relocating the following year to Colorado Springs to work for local businessman, Edmond C. van Diest, President of the Western Public Service Company and the Colorado Concrete Company. Bunnell would spend almost all of his adult life in Colorado Springs.
In 1918 he enlisted in the United States Army, serving in the 62nd Infantry Regiment through the end of World War I. Returning home with a 10% disability, he joined the Zebulon Pike Post No. 1 of the Disabled American Veterans Association and in 1921 used the benefits from his disability to attend a class in commercial art design conducted under a government program in Colorado Springs. The following year he transferred to the Broadmoor Art Academy (founded in 1919) where he studied with William Potter and in 1923 with Birger Sandzén. Sandzén’s influence is reflected in Bunnell’s untitled Colorado landscape (1925) with a bright blue-rose palette.
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Previously Available Items
Trails, casein on panel impressionist Maine winter landscape, 2020
By Alan Bray
Located in New York, NY
An homage to the Appalachian Trail, Bray’s latest deep-winter scene considers the difference between human intent and animal instinct. White blazed t...
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2010s American Impressionist Alan Bray Art
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Sentinel, green and pink casein on panel impressionist landscape painting, 2020
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Located in New York, NY
In Sentinel, Alan Bray’s layers of casein marks appear to emerge from beneath the space of the panel - the forest haze seeping up rather than resting upon the surface. The sentinel, ...
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2010s American Impressionist Alan Bray Art
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Spring House, Impressionist casein Maine winter landscape painting, 2018
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Located in New York, NY
Bray has explored a smaller, more demure 8.5 x 11 inch format for two of these casein on panel paintings. When coupled with his rich palette and tightly hatched bed of brushstrokes, ...
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Alan Bray, Abandoned Spring, Casein on panel landscape painting, 2018
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H 19.75 in W 19.75 in D 2.25 in
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Alan Bray, Ghost, landscape lithograph on Rives BFK, 2012
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Alan Bray, Four Things in the Wind, charcoal and conte landscape drawing, 2015
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Alan Bray art for sale on 1stDibs.
Find a wide variety of authentic Alan Bray art available for sale on 1stDibs. If you’re browsing the collection of art to introduce a pop of color in a neutral corner of your living room or bedroom, you can find work that includes elements of blue and other colors. You can also browse by medium to find art by Alan Bray in casein paint, paint, tempera and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 21st century and contemporary and is mostly associated with the Impressionist style. Not every interior allows for large Alan Bray art, so small editions measuring 18 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Samuel Hyde Harris, Stephen Motyka, and Edward Henry Potthast. Alan Bray art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $7,200 and tops out at $12,000, while the average work can sell for $11,000.