Council On Aging

Ray Elman has been making large-scale portraits of people in the Outer Cape art community since 1989.  The COA Gallery will exhibit Elman’s portraits of some of the artists and writers he met during the 1970s, his first decade living in Truro.

Included in the exhibit will be portraits of Sydney Simon, B.J. Lifton, E.J.Kahn, Jr, Lee Falk, Walter Bingham, Varujan Boghosian, and Anne Bernays.

Elman’s portraits of Pulitzer Prize winning poets Alan Dugan (Truro) and Stanley Kunitz (Provincetown) are included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.  The Kunitz portrait is on display at the National Portrait Gallery until November, 2011.

Elman’s portrait of U.S. Ambassador Alan Solomont and his family (Truro summer residents) is currently on display at the embassy in Madrid.

Elman moved to Truro in September of 1970 and has made it his home base ever since.  He started the Outer Cape Repertory Film Society in 1971, ran the "To Be Coffeehouse" from 1972 to 1973; and he served for many years on the Boards of Directors of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Provincetown Group Gallery, and the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. Elman and Chris Busa co-founded Provincetown Arts magazine in 1985 (Ray left the magazine in 1989, when his son Evan was born).

Ray is married to Lee Elman, who until recently served as President of Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill.  Their son Evan, who attended the Truro Central School, is a senior at the University of British Columbia, but still considers Truro his home base.

Hello, and thank you for coming to the art show at the Council on Aging in Truro. As an artist, I have explored multiple media. Glass was my first serious fascination. I majored in glass at Mass. College of Art in Boston, studying under Dan Daley. I received my B.F.A. and was recognized by the Corning Museum of Glass in "New Glass Review 5." After graduating I had the honor of a fellowship at the Creative Glass Center of America where I was awarded the Rothko Award of Excellence for my work. The University of Illinois then offered me a graduate teaching position and full scholarship to their M.F.A. with Bill Carlson in glass. I accepted the position, but decided I wanted to explore sculpture instead. While there I received a "Best in Show" Award at the Evanston Art Center in Chicago for my sculpture.

Now about my work . . . Transforming objects and materials has always fascinated me . . . My work is additive, not reductive. When I work, my gut, my heart, and my brain come together in what I call my "art zone" where time stands still. Sounds weird, but the "zone" is where everything comes from. The sculptures that emerge from this process always surprise me.

I have had many a caree, but art and artistic sensibilities have always been an important part of my life -- as long as I can remember. I grew up in Melrose, MA, just outside Boston. I went to college at Williams in the Berkshires and then to Georgetown Law in D.C. After a public service law career, mostly with the Federal Trade Commission, I turned to the restaurant business - Gallerani's Cafe in Provincetown. As many of you may know, it was an exciting and wonderfully rewarding phase of my life. Now I am semi-retired and living in P-town and Kauai. Throughout this time I have been doing artwork. It started out with photography (with my father actually,) water colors (studied with Gail Browne,) then pastels (John DiMestico,) oils (Carol Westcott.) I think the power of art for me is primarily the beauty of the aesthetic and color - entertainment for the eye, the ability to be transformed into another place, and/or the ability of an artwork to make you look at something with a new and refreshed eye.