Selected Ray Paintings

Robin Neate is a Christchurch based artist and senior lecturer in painting at Ilam School of Fine Art, University of Canterbury.

These works from “The Ray Paintings” series of 2013 are a homage to Nicholas Ray (1911 – 1979) and his film noir masterpiece “In a Lonely Place” (1950). Ray himself (whom Neate named his Ray Paintings series after) was “the outcast Hollywood rebel, white hair, black eye-patch, and a head full of subversion and controlled substances.” 

In writing about the isolation or outsiderness of Ray’s cinema, the filmmaker and critic Jacques Rivette proposed that “everything always proceeds from a simple situation where two or three people encounter some elementary and fundamental concepts of life. And the real struggle takes place in only one of them, against the interior demon of violence … which seems linked to man and his solitude.” (Nick Harte, 2018 for the Christchurch Art Gallery).

These works  are sumptuous chromatic fields evoking and reinterpreting the distribution of Canterbury’s gloriously pinkish twilit horizons on a brisk, autumn night. Works in this series are in the Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery collections.  

"Gloria Grahame" 2013, oil on canvas, 1830 x 1365 mm