Artist Sara Ray’s sinister paintings draw from Long Beach’s underbelly

SARA RAY’S “THE TROUBLE WITH ZOMBIES”

“I’m not sure where the idea for this came from,” artist Sara Ray says as we regard Driven by Demons, one of about 20 of her oil paintings that you’ll see this March in “The Devil Lives in Long Beach,” her solo show at Greg McCormack’s Two Bits Gallery.

It’s a nighttime scene of wispy toxic green ghosts chasing a purple early Ford five-window coupe through a ranch-style fence and nearly off a cliff. They’re slightly Raiders of the Lost Ark-y, if you’re of a certain age—but good—and the Ford, well, it’s a hot rod.

“I was probably really depressed,” says Ray, a longtime Long Beach artist who moved to Whittier for the location—a 1919 back house—and, of course, the parking. Or maybe she was thinking about Long Beach.

You can’t literally see our city in what Ray paints, but she readily admits that Long Beach’s waterfront spirit still informs her work.

“Something about a seedy port town—the only thing that Long Beach is missing is the old Pike [amusement park] and it would be perfect,” says Ray, who is still moving out of her home in North Long Beach. “It already has the feeling. You have huge swaths of suburbia but then you have these border town areas. You can either get into or stay out of anything depending on your mood.”

On canvas, Ray’s mood usually gets her characters into trouble; in The Trouble With Zombies—a scene of a ’50s sweater girl beckoning three zombie juvie delinquents in a Ford roadster—there’s a pervasive sense of menace that lingers after you look away. It’s the same feeling you might get from driving certain streets here at night.

“It’s not underworld but maybe underground things—hot rods and customs,” Ray says of the avenues she drove in her longtime ride, a ’69 Nova. “Maybe the devil doesn’t live in Long Beach but he has a vacation home here.”

SARA RAY: THE DEVIL LIVES IN LONG BEACH TWO BITS GALLERY | 915 E WARDLOW RD | LONG BEACH 90807  562.761.7966 | SARARAY.COM | OPEN BY APPOINTMENT

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