Rex Ray by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2020-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

MAKEMAKE

REBECCA SOLNIT

WHEN I THINK OF WHAT Rex Ray looked like back then when I spent a lot of time with him, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d say he reminded me of Tigger if Tigger had been drawn by Tom of Finland; he was full of convexities and curves, the outcurve of muscles and incurve of a snub nose, upturned smile, round brim of cap, round blue eyes, arabesques of gesture, oscillations of sound. Like Tigger he seemed to be perpetually in motion with what seemed like boundless energy and amused good humor, laughing and cavorting and swimming through the days and nights like they were his own pool. Only now, looking back, do I realize that his graphic art with its own curvilinear forms—teardrops, disco amoebas, frolicking wheels, and arches and bursts and oviforms and exclamation points blimping out—had a line and energy like the man himself.

Rex’s voice had the vibrato of a growl and the pleasedness of a purr: rich, droll, amused, and affectionate, amplifying whatever was fun in the moment and skewering what was ridiculous, though he was extravagantly affectionate with whoever he loved. He could’ve been scary because he was a great skewerer and mocker, but he radiated too much warmth for that.

Even his nom de plume was a work of art for its precision and celebration—“Rex” for king and for all those fun mid-century figures, like Rex Harrison and Kenneth Rexroth, and “Ray” for maybe possibly something vaguely resembling the love child of Man Ray and Fay Wray. “Rexy,” the adjectival form, was something I used to call him, and also “Lambchop!” to which he’d reply in that rich roar, “Cupcake!” He was a pleasure principle, and his art was made on that principle, to bring joy and maybe amusement, to take the vocabularies of mid-century modernism in design and maybe early modernism in painting and let them splash and crash together in exquisite color, in ruby and lavender and mustard and dove gray, in a palette that seemed to be his signature as much as the forms were, in colors having a party to which you were invited.

I met him in 1989 as two different people. One was a student named Michael Patterson on the roster of the first class I ever taught, at the San Francisco Art Institute, who never showed up. The other was the boyfriend of Gent Sturgeon, who he was for many years before and some after that moment when we met through Gent. Gent was the reclusive, melancholic City Lights bookseller and artist who in 1988 took me under his wing when I was also working on my first book with City Lights as publisher. He discussed ideas, advised, and protected me, and worked with Rex and me on the book’s hundred-plus images.

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