Ray Strong (1905 - )

Artist information from Sullivan Goss web site

"If you want to get to know the land, go and sleep with it." Ray Strong knows the land. Ray Strong has been a landscape painter, muralist and poet since he was just eight years old.
Strong was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1905. While he attended high school, Strong began painting plein air with Clyde Keller of Portland. Realizing his passion for art, Strong enrolled first in the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Fine Arts Institute). Strong then went to New York, and studied with Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students League.

In the early 1930s, Strong returned to San Francisco where he helped organize the Art Students League of San Francisco. There he studied and taught with Maynard Dixon (1879–1938), Frank Van Sloun (1879–1938) and George Post (1906–1997), and eventually opened an Artist’s Cooperative Gallery. During the Depression, Strong painted murals for the WPA. Some of his 1930s paintings are now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In 1960, Strong and his wife Elizabeth, moved to Santa Barbara, California, for "the birds and the banks." Strong had been commissioned to paint the backgrounds to dioramas in the Bird Hall of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, as well as some paintings for a local bank. Ray Strong is now also recognized as the inspiring eldest member of the Oak Group, and still lives and works in Santa Barbara County.