Alan Bray was born in Waterville, Maine, and grew up in Monson, a small slate-quarrying town set in the northern reaches of the Appalachians. Bray attended the Art Institute of Boston before graduating from the University of Southern Maine; he received his MFA in painting from the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, Italy. It was during this formative time in Florence that he was exposed to casein tempera on panel.

Bray’s work has been the subject of no less than 25 solo exhibitions and is included in the public collections of the Portland Museum of Art, ME; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, MA; the Farnsworth Museum of Art, ME; Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, NY; Zillman Art Museum, ME; Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, WI; Lyman Allyn Museum of Arts, New London, CT;  Maine Savings Bank Collection, Memphis Cancer Center, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts, Menlo Park, CA; among others. The artist lives and works in Sangerville, Maine.

As both a naturalist and a painter, Bray is drawn to what often goes unnoticed. “I paint what is right around me,” he says. “Occasionally it’s a big subject, but more often it’s a bird’s nest or a farm pond.” Like the subtle geometry of his compositions, Bray’s preference for modest, unassuming subjects—backwater meanders over mountaintop vistas—is deliberate and quietly profound. He has become an expert observer of bogs and shorelines, rock slides and fallow fields, daybreaks and dusks, the shifting edges of seasons. In the overlooked landscapes of his native Maine, Bray uncovers a deep sense of spirituality that gives his work its quiet power—transformative in its presence, not merely descriptive.

Bray paints in casein, a milk-based tempera that has virtually no drying time. Necessarily, his paintings are technically complex because they consist of thousands of tiny brush strokes, built up in layers, out of which the images – the vision – advance from the foundation of a mirror-smooth, absolute void of white ground. It is a method of painting that follows directly from his method of exploring his subjects.