Ogunquit News
Husband and wife team opens new gallery in Ogunquit
By Virginia L. Woodwell
Heather Lewis Rocray and husband David Rocray recently opened their LR Gallery on Shore Road in Ogunquit. The two have deep familial and professional connections to the Ogunquit-York area and are looking forward to sharing their varied artwork with residents and visitors in the beautiful seaside community they both love.
Photos by Virginia Woodwell
OGUNQUIT - Two weeks ago, on July 6, artist Heather Lewis Rocray, formerly known as Heather Sargent, and her sculptor husband David Rocray, opened a little gallery in town to showcase their own works.
And this week, from 3 to 8 p.m. today, Wednesday, July 18, they're staging a reception there to celebrate.
The gallery, called "LR" for the couple's initials, and located at 200 Shore Road in the carriage house attached to Roberto's Restaurant, represents a homecoming of sorts for the pair, since, two years ago, they left the area to carve out a new professional life for themselves, along with a new gallery, in Rockland.
"That didn't work out," they explained this week, but, since then, all has fallen into place to effect the move back, and, happy with their return, settled into a new home in North Berwick, and busy at several other undertakings, they're viewing the new Ogunquit venture with some philosophical detachment.
"If it works and is a wonderful success, O.K., and if not, that's O.K., too," said Heather on Thursday. "It's a show. It will be a nice, summertime show in a beautiful seaside community."
Both Rocrays have local roots.
David, the son of Bertha - who has run Jack and Jill Nursery School in York for about 35 years - and the late David Rocray, was born and brought up in York, but has, as well, a lifelong connection with Ogunquit, where he's been a chef as well as a Perkins Cove tuna fisherman. A 1988 graduate of Berwick Academy, he attended the Wentworth Institute of Technology, the Portland School of Art and the University of Southern Maine.
From Wentworth's foundation program in industrial design, he has stated in a published biography, he gained training in "everything from drafting [and] the history of architecture and furniture to materials and techniques."
But he would eventually, as he put it, "grow disgusted with the product-oriented ways of art school" and drop out to pursue work with metals, stone and wood on his own.
"A natural harmony began to develop," he added, "because I no longer saw myself as the creator, just merely the assembler of works."
David's passion to work in a variety of materials, to mix them, and to let their "voices," as he calls them, speak variously through him, is reflected in the new gallery's offerings. These include a thick oval ring, perhaps a foot-and-a-half long, of pink alabaster, smooth on one side, rougher on the other, titled "Lush" and mounted on a plank of Honduran mahogany. Both the plank and the alabaster are polished, the stone with linseed oil to reveal its rich veins.
Other works there by David include a sparse, human-sized, free-standing construct of steel, brass, African mahogany and cherry wood that he calls, cryptically, "Emily and Phil," and "lantern lamps," made of white pine and handmade paper.
The carriage house has a worn, wood-planked floor silvered by age, and a ceiling of rough beams; the glow from David's lamps softens its primitive ambiance.
Heather Lewis Rocray, the daughter of artists Jack and the late Dorothy Lewis, grew up in Delaware and attended the Philadelphia School of Art and, more recently, from 1996 to 2000, the State University of New York's Center for Distance Learning. She has worked as a graphic designer, has exhibited widely and has taught.
Marriage and a family - she has three adult children by a previous marriage - brought her to York, to which her parents also eventually came. Prior to her marriage to David in July of 2005 and their move away, she was a member of the adjunct faculty at both Hesser College and McIntosh College, and, since her return to the area, she has resumed teaching art with courses in, among other topics, interior and graphic design, art history, textiles, typography and drawing at those institutions.
She also gives private lessons, to both groups and individuals, and, in the process, reveals a philosophy that is at the core of her own art.
"The medium is less important," she said this week, "than the process of observing and capturing what's observed."
In a statement on her website that echoes her husband's, she has expanded on that thought as it pertains to teaching.
"Creativity is a sacred thing. I think it is about process, not product - ignoring the judgmental chatter in our heads, detaching from outcome and permitting ourselves to make mistakes which so often create openings for discovery. When I work with people I hold space for their creative expression, which I believe is real SOUL work..."
Applying this thinking to her own work, she writes, "My art is a fusion of my outer sensory world and my inner world of memories, dreams, and abstract images. I capture the scenes of the natural world around me: landscapes, seascapes, and distant horizons, and frame them in a bold window."
In the Shore Road gallery, her pictures illustrate: some are recognizable landscapes and seascapes but they verge on the abstract, while her abstractions often contain representational material like butterflies, leaves or even script. And a given painting - her "Golden Butterfly and Script," for example - is likely to be executed in not just one medium but several, from oils and tempera to India ink, wax crayons and pastels.
She favors no medium over another, she reported this week, and noted, laughing, that the resulting variety among her works "makes it look like there are about five different artists in here."
At the LR Gallery, prices for a Heather Lewis Rocray painting start at $300, with some at $600 and several at $900, but she also makes prints of some of her works available for as little as $15 and $25.
"One enhances the other," she says of the choice between print and original work.
Among David Rocray's works, the price on the alabaster carving is $2,650 and on "Emily and Phil," $1,100, but that on his lamps is just $50.
"So there's something for everyone," said Heather, adding, "We want our work to be accessible, so we don't want to price ourselves out of the market. We're artists, and we want to be working."
For images of both Rocrays' works, and for more information, visit http://www.lewisrocray.com/.
