Ray Caesar/Gallery House

Ray Caesar/Gallery House

Ray Caesar/Gallery House

Ray Caesar/Gallery House

 

Mini Interview with RAY CAESAR:

Your childhood ambition:

To survive and escape the insanity…to feel like a normal human being. To live the life of those windows I looked in across the road in the other apartment building. Those windows looked happy and kind and safe and full of warmth and I make pictures now because I drew windows into a kinder world than what I found myself in.

Something you treasure:

The love and care I have for my wife and family and good friends. I love my life and the constant treasure I find in each day. To have health and a life that allows you to pursue your dream and to live in a land of freedom is a true and blessed gift.

Your worst habit:

Thinking I can’t do something when I can. There is a feeling of wanting to stay down on the floor after each hit that life hands out but to find a way to listen to that faint voice that says to you “get up”. Life is a constant battle against that bad habit of thinking too low. I always know I can do better but I have a habit of thinking I can’t, I have found that there are more ways of doing things than brute effort and the first step in achieving a desired reality is to allow yourself to believe that that the imagined reality is possible …that’s the hard part and after that it’s all easy as pie.

The aspect of your work that’s most important to you:

The pure and absolute joy I get from creating. It’s a pure and unadulterated pleasure that’s hard to describe. To make something from nothing but thought is like finding a magical genie in a bottle. I love that I can communicate my feelings and emotions through pictures and that I can come to terms with difficult memories and events in my life by making a window into another world that can turn that memory into something beautiful and worthy of the act of remembering.

Your first job:

I had to deliver newspapers when I was eight years old. It was a massive paper route that had hundreds of deliveries and took 4 hours to finish and I hated every minute of it. Later I had to go and try and collect the money for a week’s worth of papers and some people never wanted to pay or even open the door. I came home covered in ink and exhausted as the papers often weighed more than I did. I was the dirtiest kid in class as it was so hard to wash the ink off myself and my clothes and my sheets on my bed were covered in black ink. I folded each paper by hitting the newspaper with my knee and running it under my arm and neck so I could fold it with one hand and slip it into a letter box so I literally was covered in ink. Strangely now 46 years later I am still working with paper and ink so I suspect it was a kind of fate and destiny that the thing I hated turned into the thing I love. As I delivered each paper into a letter box I looked through the folded paper into the rooms of each apartment like a little peeping tom …it was an impressionable time for me as I saw so much through those letter boxes of all the different worlds and life …I once saw a man who had died in his armchair and was as white as a ghost in a green housecoat…I watched later as the ambulance came and took him away.

Someone whose work you highly recommend:

I love the work of a Japanese artist called Chiho Aoshima. Absolutely beautiful work.

 

View Ray Caesar’s artwork here.