Savannah, Georgia, USA
José Ray is one of the coolest cats in Savannah, Georgia. Not only is he the grooviest DJ in town, but he’s also (dare I say) the grooviest artist. He paints bright multimedia pieces of psychedelic flowers. It’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll be drawn to them like a moth to a flame. Get ready to be obsessed…
See? I was going somewhere with that “cool cat” thing!
What’s your first memory of art making?
My mom used to work at an ice cream packing plant and she would bring home these cardboard slips for me to draw on. I would spend hours filling them up with scenes from my little imagination.
How did you find the medium you currently work in? Do you ever switch it up?
Well, these two questions kind of answer each other because I’m using so many different mediums in my current work, and that came from jumping around and trying lots of different things out. At times I would stick to one more so than others, then I would get intrigued by another and try it out for a while. With each different set of tools I would find the pros and cons, but just work with and around the “drawbacks”.
Finally I realized that if there was a void in my work because of the limitation of that medium, then I should just go back through my history of other mediums and figure out which one could fill that void. Once I had that epiphany, it was no longer about the medium, it was about creating and being open to the possibility that each new piece may need something different than those that preceded.
How do you feel about artists working in more mediums than one? Do you think it’s better for artists to stick with one medium?
I think my stance on this is pretty clear (said with a humorous tone). It is, however, important to spend time with a medium and really figure it out. And once you think you’ve figured it out, do something else with it.
“Try to surprise yourself, and once you get that feeling and you’re excited about it… follow that path as far as it will take you. Repeat as often as necessary.”
Do you have a degree in art or are you self-taught? If you received a degree in art, did you go straight into art making full time or was it a different journey? When was the “a-ha!” moment where you decided to take on art as a career?
College was never even thought about when I was growing up. It just wasn’t an option for a variety of reasons, but as I got a few years into my twenties I realized that I needed to make a move and try something that would shake things up and maybe something would happen. So when I was 24, I started attending Johnson County Community College in the Kansas City area. This was an incredibly frightening and uncertain step for me, but it was also invigorating! I was figuring it all out on my own and had no idea how this whole thing worked, but I got in there and stumbled around until I started to grasp it and kept following leads as they appeared and guided me closer to my path.
Eventually I made my way to the Savannah College of Art & Design and now have a degree in Painting and Illustration. Even before graduating, I made it a point to get involved with creative projects outside of the college circuit. This had a lot to do with the fact that I was already in my mid/late twenties, had experience, and was ready to get things moving! I bring up this point because I knew it was going to be a slow build for me. It was, and the only way I was able to make it work was by slowly weaning myself off of the 9-5. I had been, for years, earning income with freelance work here and there but it was far from sustaining me. Then I cut my hours down from my full time job and supplemented those hours by working at Scribble, a children’s art studio. The whole time still freelancing in the background and building up my “resumé”, so that eventually the freelancing was able to replace my original job. Now I’m working about 20 hours a week at the children’s art studio and supplementing the rest of my income from my freelance work, until a couple years later when it became apparent that it was time to focus fully on my own work.
“I’m sure this goes without saying, but that was such a glorious moment for me. It had been decades of constant and tireless effort, and now I had finally created an environment for myself where I could immerse myself into my creative work. I give daily gratitude for this opportunity.”
Tell me about your creative space! Do you have an in-home studio or do you rent a space? Do you prefer one over the other if you’ve experienced both types of spaces? Is your studio messy or organized?
For me, the home studio has always been the way to go. A- I didn’t have the money, and B- my schedule was so tight that the loss of time traveling to an out-of-home studio was an important factor.
My studio is a hybrid of organization and total mess. I feel it’s important to spend the time in setting up an organized space so that when you’re getting into a project/piece you can make a mess and then things go back so I’ll know where to find them next time.
Do you work on multiple pieces at once?
Definitely. Two reasons: Certain media are a lot of work just to get set up and ready to use, so when I’m using watercolor, I try to lay out as many pieces as possible and just go wild on all of them at once- this also cuts down on waste. The other reason is that once you’ve spent hours, days, weeks on a piece you start seeing it differently than someone seeing it for the first time.
“You want to get your mentality back to the state of the first time viewer and sometimes this requires just putting the piece aside and forgetting about it for a little while.”
What are you currently working on?
Currently I am building panels so I can start another series of paintings. Same idea as setting up the studio workspace: if I’m going to get all the tools out for woodworking, I’m going to make as many panels as possible so that later on they are there waiting for me when inspiration hits! I’m also doing research for prints, working on a comic, and I have multiple mural gigs in the design stages right now.
What inspires your work?
This is going to sound like a cop-out, but Everything inspires me. Just observing the world around and all the moving parts and cycles within and around it. From the smallest details to the rhythms and patterns that we are a part of but often don’t notice because of their scale and scope of time. I just love pondering about these things.
How do you balance real life and art making? Do you schedule your creative time? Do you create everyday?
Well, fortunately these days the two have become one-and-the-same, but all those years before I would often work myself ragged to finish projects on time and put forward nothing but my absolute best every time. I’ve always been a bit of a perfectionist and workaholic and definitely sacrificed a lot of other areas of my life to make sure that my creative projects got all the attention that they needed.
Was it worth it? In my opinion, absolutely. I wouldn’t have done it any other way. That got me where I am now, but it’s definitely nice to be able to breathe a little bit now too. I have gotten into the practice of writing a daily checklist for the week. I sit down Sunday evening and take a look at my calendar to see what the week holds, then I break down what needs to happen each day. This is incredibly important since I am usually working on multiple projects at any given time.
It is my nature to want to dive in head first on a project and not resurface until it’s finished, but if I do that, inevitably that some other project will be sacrificed in some manner. By stepping back and looking further down the path I’m able to more steadily work on each project and bring them all up together without the mania…or at least, not as much of the mania.
I wish I could say that I create everyday, but there are plenty of days that just get eaten up by emails, calls, and meetings. But jumping back to my thoughts on inspiration…
“…everything holds meaning and potential if you are open to seeing it, so therefore it’s all part of the creative process.”
How do you feel about social media in the art world?
Like all technology, it is a great tool but can also be a great detriment. It has helped me quite a bit, but to be honest, I’ve always kind of shied away from social media. I was very reluctant to engage them at all but eventually it became obvious that if I wanted to try and make this thing happen for myself then I was probably going to have to engage the social media, and now here I am! Please follow me at @JoseRaySay!
What message do you hope comes across through your artwork?
Stop and smell the flowers.
