Don Gray paintings

Large pastel self-portraits. "Some artists do self-portraits, other artists don’t. Self-portraits have always interested me, both those of other artists and my own. Artists who do numbers of them may be more introspective. One thinks of Rembrandt and Van Gogh as two major artists who painted many self-portraits. Artists of this kind are interested not only in how their features look and the challenge of how to paint them, but what the mood or feeling is being transmitted by their expression. It is a kind of self-involvement, but not at the exclusion of the rest of the world, as is obvious with Rembrandt and Van Gogh. But the artists themselves, the fact of their own being, their own feelings, also figure in their expressive needs. Through themselves as subject matter, they learn not only about themselves, but about humanity in general; what we are, think and feel. My pastel self-portrait features the contrast of a very still, solidly monumental figure with angled, seemingly slipping, sliding books in a bookcase. It is interesting to compare the ruggedness of this incarnation with my 'Self-Portrait with Tie.'"