Ray Pierroti’s painting process, reflecting the development of individuals, consists of the multi-layering of three media on untreated cotton and paper. On cotton, he applies a colorfast dye, acrylic paint, and colored pencil. The Shellman, Ga.-based artist says his process is similar to an individual’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development over time. Resonance and sympathetic relationships, he says, form vibrational patterns through which colors, shapes, and sounds commune, and exist equally in painting and in music. This phenomenon, first intuited in Pierotti’s youth, now has scientific support and is the source of his creative inspiration.
The Way of Life, an exhibition of Pierotti’s artworks, is on display Jan 20 – April 23, 2022 in the Haley Gallery of the Albany Museum of Art.
“It seems to me, in contemporary society that we have relegated the arts to surface embellishment and entertainment,” Pierotti said. “In reality, its place should be intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development. Science has distorted our reasoning into classes of either/ors. Art’s purpose is to bypass the scientific mind, which is limited to the finite. The arts lead us to the heart’s intelligence, where perceptions are infinite, beyond either/ors, towards unification.”
A native of Bountiful, Utah, Pierotti evidenced musical and artistic talents early in life. After serving two years in the U.S. military in Korea and Japan, he moved to France for two years of mission work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and later worked at the American Library in Paris. After completing his first undergraduate degree at La Sorbonne, Pierotti returned to Utah and earned his BFA and MM in musicology and music composition at the University of Utah.
He is the former director of The Arrowmont School and associate professor at the University of Tennessee. He opened and directed the Sawtooth School of Visual Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C., reopened the Hambridge Center for Creative Arts in North Georgia, and directed the International Museum of Art & Design (now the Museum of Design Atlanta). In the 1990s, he moved his studio from Atlanta to Shellman, where he and his life partner, Gene Lewis, opened the Center for Art and Rehabilitative Energies.
Pierotti has exhibited at the Albany Museum of Art; the Sawdust Gallery, New York City; the South Carolina Museum of Art; the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tenn.; the Fine Arts Museum at the University of Idaho; the University of the South; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem; the Greenville (S.C.) Center for the Arts, and other public and private galleries.
