The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland and Stephen Romano Gallery in Brooklyn are thrilled to present the first exhibition of British artist RAY ROBINSON's series "THE THIRD DOOR"

The exhibition will open November 17th 2021 and continue through January 15 2022.

In this exhibition of paintings produced between 2015 and 2016, the artist confronts his native England's often difficult - and contentious history with witchcraft. While selections from the series were previously included in group exhibition curated by Stephen Romano, this is the first exhibition devoted to the entire series. A catalog with contributions from Alfred Rosenbluth, Charlotte Rodgers and Steven Intermill will accompany the exhibition.

Ray Robinson was born in the UK in 1931 and began his professional career as a mathematician. Seeking a significant change of course in his life in his late 20's, Ray discovered the works of David Bomberg, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Cezanne. He was heavily impacted by their attempts to create a visually ordered perceptual space within their works, as well as seeking to create a visual immediacy through truth to materials.

This set Ray off on a path of working directly from the model, which he continues to do to this day, living in seclusion with his wife Brenda in Nova Scotia. While his works are most often straightforwardly figurative—landscape or still life--this body of work is the exceptional, delving into dark corners such as witch burnings and hangings, demonic apparitions, paranormal visions, occult rituals, and the old religion. Ray Robinson's affinity to these subjects germinates from him spending his summers as a young boy with his grandmother, who apprenticed him in the old ways of the witch.

In the early 1960's, Ray was accepted as a student at the esteemed SLADE School of Fine Art in London under the tutelage of sculptor Reg Butler, where he befriended and exhibited alongside many of the major British artists of the 1960's such as David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, Henry Moore, and others. Fellows Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, also followers of David Bomberg, and Ray Robinson, were at the forefront of a revival of the pendulum of taste swinging back toward painting as beauty for beauty's own sake.

Due to his controversial teaching methods being challenged, and a subsequent rebellion by his faithful students at Bath Academy, Ray decided to make a move across the Atlantic. He began teaching art in London Ontario, and later at a community college in Sarnia, Ontario, a small city which borders the US just north of Detroit. This is where the exhibition curator first met the artist when he was 19 years old and continues to hold a lifelong apprenticeship on Art, Life and Magic with him.

The artist has spoken only occasionally of this immersive body of work, which is shrouded in mystery and atmosphere, leaving the viewer the freedom to bring their own subjective experience to his art, and experience the narratives not only within the historical contexts they are situated, but also within the broader context of how the esoteric awakens their own sense of grander aspirational possibilities. It is an essential aspect to a greater appreciation of the art of Ray Robinson, that one feels the immediacy of the medium, and allows that primal sensory experience to transport us into the cinematic space the artist creates for us. Thus, the artist’s role becomes a shamanic one, and the art itself is a social healing device.

The thread of continuity which anchors this series of paintings with Ray Robinson's entire oeuvre is at its core--is drawing, in this instance with paint, "colored mud" as Robinson calls it. This perpetuates the legacy of the grand tradition of artists who preceded him, such as Cezanne, Chiam Soutine, Alberto Giacometti, Willem De Kooning and David Bomberg.

Ray Robinson has said of "The Third Door":

Witches? Poor Devils

Each of the paintings has a true circumstance…and the result of my ‘being there’ and so pass through the matrix of memory and through the archetype that defined the first vision and set our Parameters.. To an inner meaning without external references.

‘When reason sleeps in the minds of the wise Witches burn and demons rise’

THE ART OF RAY ROBINSON: THE THIRD DOOR by Charlotte Rodgers, October 6 2016

For further information and images, please contact Stephen Romano at romanostephen@gmail.com or Buckland Museum director Steven Intermill at bucklandmuseum@gmail.com

RECENT PRESS

The exhibition "The Third Door" is the sixth collaborative project between The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick and Stephen Romano Gallery. Previous exhibitions have included "WILLAM MORTENSEN'S WITCHES", "BARRY WILLIAM HALE", "Apparitions: Specters, Conjures and the Paranormal", "Transmutations: Witches, Healers, and Oracles" and most recently the first exhibtion in over 50 years of Los Angeles visionary Burt Shonberg "Beyond the Pleasuredome, the lost occult works of Burt Shonberg".