Retired Corporate Exec Turns Artist

A new art display at has everybody talking.

The art's creator, Jerry Gray, is a retired corporate executive of a major U.S. company.

For years, while Gray was in meetings or on teleconferences, he kept his mind focused by creating intricate designs on the back of business cards or in the margins of yellow pads, and eventually on the back of coasters he collected from his constant travels.

Gray said he was “intently engaged on these calls, one part brain on the call, the other on doodling.” The "doodling" became an obsession. Early on, he would empty his briefcase every Friday night and his wife, Cindy, would put his drawings in a Tupperware container.

They began framing some of these as gifts in the late ‘90s which were so well received that their ideas expanded. When his drawings were accepted two times for exhibition in the Minnesota State Fair Fine Arts Show, they began earnestly to reproduce the designs in larger sizes and found that the works stood alone as complex, colorful, intricate images that evoke movement, emotion and music in the minds of viewers. 

Gray's work has also been exhibited at the Minnetonka Art Center, International Market Square and is hanging in several private collections.

Gray is a trained musician, has an MBA in finance from UCLA and is wholly self schooled as an artist. He has played piano/keyboards since early childhood and still performs with a Twin Cities band—Stray Voltage. He has performed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland as part of the Corporate Battle of the Bands (where he was named “best keyboardist” in ‘04) and recently returned to play at the Hall as part of an all-star band for the 2010 event.

A reception for Gray is planned on Wednesday, April 18 at The Marsh.