Gordon Rayner Enter a
feeling, not
a gallery.
Choose a mood and the room itself answers — the light cools or warms, the air changes pace, and only the works that carry that feeling step forward from the dark. Everything else recedes into shadow.
Gordon Rayner
The Evolution of an Abstract Expressionist Gordon Rayner was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter whose creative process was defined by constant innovation and a frequent transformation of his medium. His early training began under his father, a commercial artist, and Jack Bush. Following a period of working in commercial art, Rayner’s direction shifted toward abstraction, influenced by the work of artists such as Willem de Koonin
g and the exhibitions of Painters Eleven. During the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, he began to incorporate found materials into his paintings, a practice influenced by the neo-Dada movement. In 1966, Rayner entered a period focused on the Magnetawan area, located north of Toronto. These works served as a space for experimentation with technique and materials, allowing him to refer to nature through oblique references an…