The Grand Bohemian Gallery celebrates autumn with the colorful panoramas of WNC painter Ray Byram. Nationally-exhibited, Byram brings to light the grandeur of the mountain colors with his “tight impressionism” – created mainly with palette knife.
His paintings will be on display through November 7th.
Originally from Elizabeth, New Jersey, Byram earned his Bachelors of Fine Arts from Indiana University in 1976. Ray is the co-founder of the Indiana University Art Museum, which he accomplished while completing a museum internship.
Byram has been painting in oil since 1969. Although he has worked in a variety of genres, styles and mediums from abstract to surreal to neo-realism, from oils to watercolors, etchings, woodcuts and serigraphy, it has been landscapes in oil that have been his primary pursuit.
His love of nature, the Appalachian forests in conjunction with his love of Impressionism have combined to synthesize his individual style which he calls a “tight impressionism”. Byram explains, “At quick glance my style obviously looks realistic, yet I employ the theories and approach of the Impressionists”.
Byram’s oils are almost exclusively done with small palette knives rather than brushes. Byram finds his inspiration throughout the eastern mountains and forests, particularly in the North Georgia and North Carolina. He also finds it in the local roads around his home in Pisgah Forest, North Carolina.
The artist explains, “There are so many beautiful roads, even the well- traveled, where it’s difficult or impossible to just stop in your tracks and take it all in. The winding roads, the light filtering through the trees…that sense of ‘realness’ to me, it is a very special spiritual magical thing.”
“What inspires me to paint is a love of beauty, of nature. I have always been strongly affected by it and instinctually drawn to it. The light filtering through the forest canopy, the mist rising from the mountains.