Ray Lonsdale MAN OF STEEL

Hello, Sculpture Vultures, and thank you for joining me today. I hope you’ve been having a lovely summer. We’ve been doing some conservation work over at Spitalfields Market, which you probably know is in the East End of London. It’s a really lovely project. We’ve been looking after a herd of elephants—21 elephants, actually—by the sculptors Gillie and Marc. Honestly, if you fancy a day out in London, I know I’m always talking about London, but it’s because it’s where I’m based. But it is really fun. There are all these fantastic, delicious food stalls—I’m sure I put on about two stone while working there—and lots of cool stalls selling their wares in the market. Paired with the fact that there are these brilliant sculptures, bronzes all around the market, it really makes it fun. I think it adds a whole other dimension. I mean, when are you going to come across a herd of elephants in the middle of a city?

So, it’s actually the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust charity who commissioned the sculptures. They decided to make a mummy elephant and 20 babies, and they’re all based on real elephants in their sanctuary—I think it’s in Nairobi—and they’re so cute. I mean, baby anything is cute, but these baby elephants really have very individual personalities, and the artists have done a really good job of capturing who each one of them is. I don’t know why Spitalfields chose exactly to have them, but it really works, and I think it’s a perfect blend of sculpture and lifestyle. I’m imagining that they’ll want to keep them there as long as possible.

Just to update you on the Maud Gonne Kickstarter, which I discussed with Orna Ross in last week’s episode, it’s come to a conclusion now and raised a fantastic £16,000 with her “More Than a Muse” campaign, which will get the process well and truly started. I think it’s never easy to get a statue created. Any of you who’ve ever thought about it will know there’s an awful lot of hoops to jump through before you even begin the process. But I’m quite sure that if anyone can do it, it will be Orna Ross and her team. I’ll let you know more about the progress as it goes along.

Another sculpture I wanted to mention that’s been in the news is the very long-awaited go-ahead for the Jane Austen sculpture in Winchester, which is going to be situated outside the cathedral. This one is going to be made by none other than Michael Jennings, who was interviewed on the show back in Season One. I think the sculpture has been on hold since 2019 for various reasons, so it’s marvellous to see a bit of energy behind it now, and that we’re going to have another brilliant female commemorated in bronze. I think it’s going to be in 2025, which is not that far away. I’m definitely going to be making my pilgrimage to see the Jane Austen Memorial, because my favourite book is Persuasion—well, one of my favourite books; I could never actually limit it to just one—but Persuasion is up there. I know Pride and Prejudice and her other books, like Emma, are much more popular on TV and things, but I just adore Persuasion. For me, that’s her absolute best.

And just before I get started on today’s show, I wanted to mention something a bit more personal. A wonderful gentleman called Dave Mattson got in touch with me recently. He works for a company in the States called Allen Architectural Metals. They do some very interesting work, and he’s a reader of my nonfiction books. He took the time to reach out to me about a week or so ago. He left me a really heavenly voice message and was just incredibly kind. I wanted to remind everyone how lovely it is when people do a small kindness like that for one another, and I encourage you to do that too. Feeding back to people about what you like about their efforts is such a boost to the creator. I thought maybe I could start a chain reaction, with Dave at the beginning, by doing that kind of thing for someone else. We so often feel too self-conscious to reach out to someone and tell them what we like about their work, particularly if we don’t know that person. But I’m going to set myself the goal of doing that more often now, and I want to encourage you to do that too. It’s so much easier than it used to be. Social media makes it easier. We’re often able to get in contact with DMs and things like that, to creators, and just, you know, tell them what you admire about their work. Make their day. I’m telling you, Dave made my day, and I really want to pass it on.

Today on the show, I’m speaking to Ray Lonsdale, a steel fabricator turned sculptor from the County Durham area. His steel sculptures have become something of a feature in the North, and his work has captured the hearts of so many people because they’re authentic, heroic, and very real. Ray has a way of introducing them to us that always has me choked up. So, I began our conversation today by asking when he first got that tingle to create something.

Ray: “Art has always been an interest of mine, ever since I was a child at school. It’s one of the few subjects at school that I really, sort of, I won’t say excelled at, but I really enjoyed. But sculpture came along around the end of 2002. It was just an interest. I had all the equipment at work, and I had some ideas for sculpture, so I’d been getting back into drawing and what have you a while before that, and sculpture was the next progression in spending time in art the way I wanted to. I just started very small. I would go up to work a couple of hours early in the morning, around five o’clock, and do a couple of hours of work on sculpture where I was playing, basically. Then I would do my day’s work, hang back for an hour at the end of the day, and do another hour. It sort of built from that. When you start to create something out of such a harsh material as steel, which has only generally been recognised for its functional purpose, it was nice to create something softer and with an emotional aspect to it, rather than just the functional aspect.”

Lucy: Let’s tell everybody what you were doing in your day job previous to that.

Ray: “Well, I’ve been self-employed since 1993 doing steel fabrication work. That was general gates, railings, litter bins for councils, seats for councils—anything that somebody wanted made out of steel, I would have a go at. I was scratching a living out of that, basically. Like I said, all the materials were there, the skills were there as to how to stick the metal together. I knew what the steel could and couldn’t do. It’s not something people can just jump into without spending a lot of money, but I’d already spent a lot of money on the equipment. It was there, and the equipment was performing its money-making task, so I decided to use it to perform my playing task, you know, for a while. But, you know, the money-making side of the work was generally the same basic principles as the art side, just a different outcome.”

Lucy: “But it sounds like you got to do your apprenticeship on all the work. I mean, you’re obviously a very experienced welder and fabricator, but all the learning and practice of putting things together and mastering welds set you up perfectly to do the sculpture. I doubt anyone would be able to jump straight into the sculpture without spending hours and hours mastering that craft to be able to do what you do.”

Ray: “Yes, I’ve spent a long time on steel fabrication, but I served an apprenticeship as a fitter. I was into nuts and bolts, engines, and mechanics. The welding side came actually before I left school. My dad was self-employed, making steel boats, and I would go up there from school and learn how to weld—what you call a stick welder at the time. From 11 years old, I don’t know if it was child labour on my dad’s part or what, but I was helping out in his workshop, learning those skills from a very young age. But, it was left alone for a long time, just like the art was, and I went in a different direction. But all of the steel fabrication skills involved in the art have been more or less self-taught. The welding processes had changed from stick welding when I was a child to MIG welding. It was all self-taught. Then you learn that a plasma cutter is a thing, so you buy a cheap one of those, realize it’s a waste of money, buy a more expensive one, and that opens up a whole new range of options for what I can do. I couldn’t do what I do without a plasma cutter and a MIG welder, but then there’s a load of other equipment that comes in as well. But all of those skills have been self-taught since I went self-employed in 1993. No formal art training. The only formal art training I did was my school O-level, which wasn’t particularly brilliant. Actually, I only got a grade C at O-level, and that was because I worked in a way I was told I shouldn’t be working.”

“To sort of skip backward and forward in time a little bit: When I was at school, I always enjoyed art lessons. But when it came to the final exam, the art teacher thought it was a good idea to have us paint the same thing over and over again so I could perfect it. But by the time I painted that thing twice, I was sick of it. The first one was enjoyable, and I thought it was good. The second one was a little bit better. The third one I had no interest in, and the fourth—by the time the exam came around, I was basically slapping paint on there, bored out of my mind. The same thing came up when I started doing sculpture. It was actually my art teacher’s ex-wife who came up to visit the workshop with him, and she said that I was doing it wrong. I basically view my pieces as three-dimensional sketches. The only pre-drawing I do is to show a client what I have in mind. But she was saying that I should be drawing every aspect of it from every angle before I even start putting stuff together. That doesn’t work for me. If I did that—if I spent a fortnight doing drawings from all sorts of angles—I’d be sick of the sight of the thing by the time it came to actually sticking metal together. So, I use a trial-and-error approach, like a three-dimensional metal sketch.”

“I’ve forgotten what the original question was, but that’s the process of my creation, and it’s slightly different from how a lot of people work. I think that lack of formal education, as far as sculpture goes, has actually served me quite well because I’m not working in somebody else’s mindset. I think that’s a self-employed thing as well. I can’t do things the way other people do them, so working for myself means I can just do it my own way and get there in the end. But there’s a bit more faith to it when you work like that—you have to believe that the thing you’re working towards is there, as opposed to having a plan with every part of it sketched out. Then there’s a very logical “if I just do this and this and this, I’ll get there.” But when you don’t have that, you’ve got to just believe you’ll get there.”

Freddie Gilroy and The Belsen Stragglers ©

Ray: “Working in that sort of process of drafting everything out beforehand takes a lot of the joy out of it for me. It takes that inspiration and that vitality you’re trying to put into it; for me, that gets removed. That’s a fault with me—I know that other people can work that way and still get that in, but I can’t. I was also told by an arts officer from one of the local councils in the early days that I would never get any work from local authorities without having an arts degree. So I started to go to night school. It was one day a week. I had two young sons at the time, so I was doing that, but it had us doing collages and all that. In the end, I thought, basically, I’m working here just to get a piece of paper in the hope of getting some work. So, I’d be better off doing the work, showing people what I can do, and trying to get in the door that way. Again, that’s my way of working. It wasn’t what was required by that particular person, but fortunately, other people were a little more open-minded and gave me a chance. Don’t get me wrong, I made a right backside of myself in the early days by walking into council offices and arts officers with a few sketches under my arm and saying, “I can make this out of steel. Do you want it?” They were polite enough not to laugh, but the door was shown quite quickly. So, you take a few steps back, get into the private market and galleries, and build from that direction.”

Lucy “So, you mentioned there were quite a lot of risks and gambles. What terrifying leaps did you have to take to actually step into being a professional?”

Ray “Well, yes, there were risks and gambles, but in the early days, it was done in a very cautious way. Like I said, I was doing art outside of work time, so it didn’t interfere with paying the bills. But in 2007, my wife and I decided that I should go full-time in art, and then the pressure was on. There were huge gambles, like with the Tommy piece that I did—the 1101 piece in Seaham. That was done on spec, and that’s a two-and-a-half-times life-size piece. That was five months of intensive work with no other money coming in, in the hope that somebody would buy it. Fortunately, at the first place it went, in Seaham, the people got together and bought it, which was hugely flattering, and it gave me a bit more confidence to keep going. But there was work before that, done in a similar vein, where you do the work, take the chance, and cross your fingers, hoping it will connect with people enough for them to take interest and put their hands in their pockets.”

“Those gambles still go on today, to a degree. I’ve been fortunate that since 1101, Wendy and I have had 10 years of back-to-back commissions, but that period is coming to an end now. I’m not that fussed about commissions coming around anymore—that’s just a sign of the times. The budgets aren’t there; people don’t have the money to spend. But I’m looking forward to scaling it down, doing pieces that interest me, and coming at it from a different angle—pieces that hopefully connect with people without the pressure of commissions.”

Lucy: There’s a Kevin Costner, film, isn’t there? —the one about “create it, and they will come,” where it’s a big field— maybe for you it is –

“Build it, they’ll come”?”

Ray: “Yeah, I mean, I work in public spaces all the time—public sculpture. I actually don’t get much feedback about the love of sculpture. I get a lot of “what are you doing that for? Shouldn’t the money go towards care homes?” I mean, there’s just no arguing with that because money needs to go to care homes too. But what I’ve seen with your work—not just Tommy, you’ve had others as well—where it’s actually the public that adopts it and wants it. It’s because those local councils probably had less to do with it in the end, wasn’t it? It has been a question of the public driving the desire for your work, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, largely. Some of the works are directly commissioned from councils—from district to town to parish—but a lot of them have been from community groups that have seen what I’m doing and thought, “we’d like this for our village.” There’s always council involvement somewhere along the line, which has to be managed. Sometimes that involvement is just saying, “yes, you can put it there,” or “no, you can’t put it there,” or “yes, we’ll chip in and help,” but that’s not always the case. Every one of them is different, but I think a large reason why people are accepting the sculpture is that they’re coming to me, and it’s generally for the heritage factor. The pits were a massive thing in the area where I live—they were the community. I know a lot of people think, “get over the closure of the pits,” but that tore the hearts out of virtually every village in the area where I live, so I’ve done quite a few miners. People want to remember that. Yes, it’s through rose-coloured glasses, but those times are worth recording. I’m not recording Churchill or kings or queens or anything like that. I’m creating pieces for the working-class people I rub shoulders with, and I use industrial processes. I think people can pick up on that and relate to it. Fortunately, that’s brought people to feel involved with it all.”

The Ball and The Bradford Boy

Ray “But also, I think the march of social media makes a massive difference compared to how it was when I first started. People can see the piece coming along, and they get involved with it that way. They can see the reason why you’re doing it, the reason why you’re doing it in a certain way, and see it from start to finish, so it becomes part of their community.”

Lucy “Tell me about steel. Is it something that brings you joy when you work with it, or is it a material that you argue with? It’s difficult. What kind of relationship do you have with it?”

“Well, steel is what I know. Basically, I’m a coward—I’m reluctant to dive into other materials. I like steel; I’ve grown up with steel. My apprenticeship was served at Coles Cranes in Sunderland, which was right on the river. On both sides of the river at the time when I started, all the shipyards were there, so you could always hear steel being worked. Steel was the main material of the factories I worked in; steel was what my dad worked in when I was a child. So, I grew up knowing steel, and I like it. I like what I can do with it. I don’t like the sparks. You get sick of catching sparks down your neck, in between the crooks of your fingers, and what have you, but everything’s got its compromise. But I’m happy sticking with steel for now. It’s always either steel or a pencil. That’s basically all I do these days.”

“You don’t need to do anything else. That’s fine. You are really comfortable with expressing emotion. You’re so articulate with it. Are you just a big softy at heart, or is it actually something you’ve got to work at?”

“No, it’s not necessarily something I’ve got to work at. But I don’t tend to show a lot of emotion in general life, with the exception of my family. I think it’s the way you’re brought up—I’m sure this area is no different from any other area. I’m of a certain age, of a certain parentage, that boys don’t cry and all that, but I think you learn as you get older that’s twaddle. Art gave me a way to show people how I feel about certain things, but also, I think you’ve got to be a bit of an actor. You’ve got to be able to put yourself in other people’s positions. I was never a miner. I had one grandfather who was a miner, but I didn’t really know what he did. I’ve got no emotional connections to mines or pits, but you’ve got to put yourself in their position—know that loss of community and loss of camaraderie—and that’s what brings ideas forward. It’s the same as when I did a piece for Mary Wilding Davidson, the suffragette who went under the king’s horse. I’m not a suffragette. I’m not a woman. I’m not from that time. But you try to put yourself in her mindset, read a bit of history about her, and try to pick up on stories of how she must have felt and what her determination was. You sort of become that character for a while. That sounds really pretentious, but you’ve got to do that to try and draw something out. Otherwise, it just becomes a three-dimensional sculpture, a two-dimensional piece, which isn’t what I’m trying to do.”

“Another thing I try to get people to connect with is every piece I do has words on it. Sometimes it’s sort of primary school poetry, but I don’t want to have a description on a piece that says, “this piece is about this person, for this reason, who did this.” I want to create interest in that as well. That’s something I quite enjoy doing—getting people to look at a piece the way you want them to look at it, without ramming the literal aspects of it down their throats. It’s all about trying to get involvement with people. Fortunately, that works quite well.”

Ray “Do you see the emotion first? Is that where you start with a piece? The emotion is so strong in your work. I mean, that mother standing in front of the War Memorial makes me want to sob. I’m a mother, so maybe I connect with it more. But there’s also Tommy and others I could mention that really choke you. So I wondered if the emotion is the starting point—you see that before you start to build it.”

“Yeah, it is with certain pieces. The one in Murton with the mother with the heart missing—I was approached by Murton Parish Council. They wanted either a miner or a soldier for the War Memorial. I’ve done miners and soldiers, but the idea that came to me was that every name on every cenotaph had a mother, and most had mothers who experienced loss. So that, to me, was a different sort of role model. It took a little bit of persuading for them to see it the way I wanted, but to be honest, I get emotional like that. I had a meeting with the various interested parties in the council about that piece, and I get choked up trying to describe what I’m trying to do. That comes across. If you feel genuine about it, that comes across, and hopefully, they connect with it. That’s what happened there, and it’s worked pretty well, actually, that one, for me and for them. The main thing is, it’s got to work for them. Sometimes it’s so disappointing when you’ve got an idea that you really think will work, but they’d rather stick with what everybody else has got. Sometimes you just want to tell them, “just try this.” I’ve done it before where I’ll say, “Look, if it doesn’t work, you don’t have to pay for it, and I’ll do what you want.” But part of the job is persuading people that you’re not just a pair of hands for their work—it’s the idea that you’re putting in. The reason why Tommy works is because of the idea behind it, the same as with the Murton piece. The ideas are what make them work, rather than the physical look of them.”

Heritage Blues ©

Lucy “You’ve created quite large pieces. Was that always the case, or did you become braver and bigger as you gained confidence in your work?”

Ray “Yeah, that’s been a general progression. You can’t—when I was first starting out and nobody knew who I was or what I’d done, with no real body of work behind me, I couldn’t sell stuff, really. I couldn’t go in with a sculpture that was going to cost £85,000 and expect people to be enthused by that or have the confidence in me. So, I started off with gallery stuff—12-inch figures, life-size heads, laminate heads, and what have you. I did quite a lot of that. But the issue with galleries was, once they get something that works and sells, they want it over and over again. As I said before, I get bored by that, but it worked for a good while. It gets your name out there because the gallery is a reassurance for people who come in and aren’t sure whether what you’re doing is good or bad. If it’s been accepted into a gallery, it’s generally deemed to be good by someone who knows what they’re talking about. So that scale increased, and towards the end of my time with galleries, I started to do some life-size figures—very cheaply—but just to show that I could do it and to have those images. Basically, I was working just to get the images to create a portfolio that I could show people to give them confidence that I could do what I said I could do.”

“Then the scale increased—like with the 1101 piece, which I keep fluctuating between calling 1101 and Tommy. For anyone listening, it’s the same piece; 1101 is the real name, and Tommy is the nickname everyone gave it. By the time that one came along, it was two and a half times life-size. But again, I knew I couldn’t just walk in with a drawing to various places and say, “Look, I want to make this. Would you be interested?” It would never have been done. So, it was a huge leap of faith for both me and my wife because she risked as much as I did to spend five months doing that piece in the hope that it would connect with people. The timing was right. It was a piece I’d wanted to do for a long time, and when 2014 was coming around—the centenary of the start of the First World War—it was in everybody’s psyche. So, it was now or never. My wife and I discussed it, and we decided to go for it and see where it led. But again, I’m wandering off-topic.”

“Paid off the gamble. It really did. But one of the questions I had, which I’m sure no listeners will be interested in, is whether you’ve had any problems with the conservation of the sculptures. I’ve worked on a bit of corten, and it’s not easy stuff to put right when you’ve had damage and things like that.”

“No, the conservation side of it—I mean, basically, what I do is fit and forget items. All you’ve got to do, unless something is deliberately done to them, is just brush the cobwebs off. There was one—well, the deliberately done stuff is the stuff that makes it—if they get graffitied or paint thrown over them and things like that. Yeah, I have seen one of yours with some damage before, I think, being Freddie Gilroy in the belt and strike. Yeah, it’s heartbreaking.”

“With some sort of anti-Semitic rant, apparently, it had yellow gloss paint thrown over it. But the material—sorry, my dog just walked away—the material is so robust that they were really concerned about it, and I said, “Just go in and clean it with whatever you need to clean it. You can clean it, whether it be high-pressure jet wash or thinners and then jet wash or whatever.” Yeah, they got it all sorted. But I haven’t really had any issues with any damage aside from that one.”

“I thought you were going to give me some great tips there.”

“I think I’ve been quite fortunate not to have any pieces suffer like that, but it will happen at some point. A car could careen off the road and smash the leg off something, or whatever. But from my point of view, it’s a case of getting them picked up, brought back to the workshop, and it can be redone. The beauty about corten, I think, is that the material all weathers in together. If one had a leg damaged and it had to be replaced, it can be done. It would look odd because most of it would be that red rust colour, and the new leg would be grey until a couple of months later when it all tempered into the same amount. So, it’s sort of self-healing in a way. You don’t have to worry about trying to blend in a repair invisibly, which I can imagine would be incredibly difficult with stone or bronze.”

Lucy “Well, I don’t know. With the Çörten, I’ve seen people treat it, and then although it’s weathering, it doesn’t weather at the same rate as the rest of the object, so it always ends up slightly out of kilter. It never quite comes to match. But that could be the way they’ve done it. And also, it’s so much easier for artists because they can just say, “You know what, I’m getting rid of this bit, and I’m remaking it and redoing it,” whereas in conservation, we have to be very mindful of preserving anything the artist originally created or touched.That means you’ve got a lot of limitations because you can’t just say, “Right, I’m wiping this bit out and redoing the whole finish,” because that would be anathema. These days, we don’t do it because of all the damage that’s been done to original work. So, it’s in a good vein, but sometimes it makes it more difficult than the artist, who would just say, “Don’t worry about that, I’m going to rebuild it.”

“I think it’s very difficult for third parties coming in to put stuff right because, basically, the artist can do what they want. If something is slightly different, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s done by the same person who did the original piece. They might want to change it slightly anyway, just for the sake of it, to make it more interesting for them. And generally, that would be accepted. I had a piece nearly two years ago now—a life-size sculpture of a Boer War soldier. It had been damaged in the ’60s, taken away to be repaired, and never came back, so there was just this empty plinth since then. I was approached to recreate that, and I thought, “Well, no, I’m not going to try and just copy that, because that was somebody else’s work, and for one thing, it’s not right.” But the other thing is, I’d just become a pair of hands then. So, I said, “I’ll do it similar,” because there were certain things they wanted to remain the same, but I changed quite a bit of it and changed the commentary on it—the words on it—to suit the modern time more because the Boer War wasn’t an easy one to defend. So, I had to change it from the successful soldier to the suffering soldier who had been drafted in to fight a war he didn’t want to fight and didn’t necessarily agree with the reasons why he was there, but you did as you were told in those days. So, I tried to change the narrative of it and the pose enough to make it mine and not the previous person’s because that’s insulting to them.”

Lucy “So, can you tell everybody where they might be able to find out a little bit more about you if they’d like to?

Ray “Yeah, I mean, as with everybody these days, there’s a website which is tworedrubberthings.co.uk, and there’s also the Facebook, which is—I always forget which way around it is—just search for “Two Red Rubber Things/Ray Lonsdale” or vice versa. But, you know, I’m quite easy to find. Like most people these days, gone are the days of raking through the old Yellow Pages.”

“Yeah, now I’ve got to ask you—you probably don’t tell anyone this, but what is Two Red Rubber Things?”

“You’re absolutely right—I don’t tell anybody. Two people in the world know the accurate answer to that. I’ve got about 30 standard answers that I dish out in random order, but I won’t insult you with any of them because they’re all lies. It’s kind of like The Stig, like you know the identity is not to be disclosed.”

“Well, thank you ever so much today for joining me. I’ve really enjoyed the chat.”

“No, thank you. I appreciate being invited on. Thank you very much.”

Lucy: One of the things I love about Ray Lonsdale’s story is that even in the rugged, practical, I’m going to even say male-dominated, world of steel fabrication and welding, there was a glimmer of something different that was ignited and grew through Ray. Art in that environment shouldn’t necessarily grow, but it did. Even Ray wasn’t aware of it at first—it was kind of dormant in him until he began to play, as he put it, and through that, it flourished.

It reminds me of a tiny poem that I learned years and years ago as a child. I think it captured my imagination, so I’m going to repeat it to you now. I’m probably going to butcher this, so I’m terribly sorry. “I have seen flowers grow in stony places, and kind deeds done by men with ugly faces, and the worst horse win the gold cup at the races. And so, I trust…” I think that’s about the quote, as far as I remember the little poem, but it really does remind me of what happened with Ray.

He is someone that is very self-aware and understands that other people’s way of working is not his own. But it didn’t put him off, which is a gorgeous thing. Despite the fact that art teachers and local authority figures were all telling him that he was doing it wrong, he just ploughed on. He did what he felt was right. I think for any of us out there who don’t quite fit the mould of traditional teaching, that’s hugely encouraging. It’s really hard to trust your own way of doing things when they are unproven. But again, it comes back to this notion of trust—knowing that sometimes things work in a way that they just shouldn’t, but they do.

Although he wasn’t successful initially, I have to really admire how brave he was to walk into people’s offices, like art councils or local authority offices, and say, “I can do this, you know.” He laughs at himself for doing it, but it was a very genuine thing. He wanted to share what he could do, and the courage to do something like that shows why I think he was successful later in his career. He had almost practiced taking risks at a smaller level and potentially being knocked back, which he was, so that he knew he could stomach it when he had to take those bigger risks.

He says that his work gave him a way to show people how he feels about things—something he can’t necessarily do in daily life. He talks about how being a creative is a bit like being an actor. You have to get into the minds and show the feelings of someone that you’re not. I really love this idea that expressing emotion is just too difficult for most humans—like in our own bodies, we can’t do that thing. It has to be expressed through some other vehicle. And in fact, it’s actually emotion, particularly, that we tend to hide and suppress. We don’t feel like we have the right to say some things. He says, “Well, I’m not a mother—what right do I have to say that?” But actually, his creations gave him that voice. They also gave him permission to express something that he felt.

We can see that from the reaction to his works, which has been overwhelmingly positive. He’s saying what people feel, but they often can’t voice it themselves. They don’t know how to voice it themselves, and they need artists like Ray to do that for them.

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