"A fair wind and a following sea..."

"Moving back in time..."

Artist, historian, explorer...

Massey was born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, in 1938. (He has childhood memories of the "Battle of Britain," the World War II bombing raids on London.) His family immigrated, after the war, to Canada and then to Buffalo, where Massey graduated from Central High School and attended the University of Buffalo. After a stint in Germany with the U.S. Army, Massey returned to Buffalo to work as a chemist and teach skating, and eventually to teach himself to paint.

Even though historical research for his paintings - and his increasingly successful exhibitions of them - have taken him around the world and across the United States many times, Massey and his wife Gayle continue to make Buffalo their home. When he isn't doing research or painting, or inventing navigational devices - such as his recently patented non-electronic velocity calculator - they cruise the Great Lakes and race his 32' Mariner ketch, the Dashing Wave (which he built himself) on Lake Erie.

During the past quarter of a century, Massey has produced a substantial body of historical paintings. He is fascinated by certain eras and subjects, and his works tend to group themselves into series which explore a specific place or period or sequence of events: Buffalo harbor (his home town), the Great Lakes steamers, the great explorers - Sir Francis Drake, LaSalle, Magellan, Cook, Vancouver, and the American China trade.

The American China Trade series took the artist on a 14-year odyssey around the globe in a quest to chronicle the seafaring saga of America's golden age of sail. With the publication of the final six prints, in 1994, the completed American China Trade limited edition collection marked a significant achievement in the annals of maritime art.

In his recently published book on Contemporary American Marine Art, Bound for Blue Water, author and art critic, J. Russell Jinishian writes, "None of the nineteenth-century trade routes are steeped in as much romance as those of China and the South Seas- from the untouched Polynesian atolls to the exotic ports of the Far East. ...no twentieth-century artist, until Ray Massey, ever made a thorough and complete study of the China trade. The twenty-five-painting series he completed in 1990 covers in meticulous detail the China trade's major vessels and ports, including the famous clippers Flying Cloud, Challenger, and Sea Serpent and their ports of call-Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore and stops in between."

Few series of original paintings, and fewer limited edition print collections produced in this century, provide such a wealth of historical insight. According to Roger Wade, an early collector of Massey's art, "Massey is the James Michener of marine art. Where Michener paints a detailed historical picture of an era through narrating fanciful historical tales, Massey allows the mind to create fanciful tales through detailed historical pictures."

In fact, Massey will not commit art to canvas until he knows every conceivable bit of information about his subject. In painting a ship's voyage, Massey signs on, in a sense, as Captain, navigator, and hand before the mast, and by the time his scholarly and artistic adventure is done, he understands the seafarers' experience from stem to stern and every point of the compass.

"When you view a Massey painting," according to noted Hawaii art critic and author, Dr. Larry LeDoux, "you are, in effect, moving back in time to become part of a real moment in our maritime past. Massey has studied the episode so thoroughly that, in a sense, he's been there, and through his paintings he takes us there." Massey's penchant for laborious research is most obvious in the journals he prepares supporting each historic scene he paints. Each journal traces the painting from the planning stages to final brush stroke and features a fascinating description of the artist's strict adherence to authenticity.

Massey's 1990 China Trade exhibition at Ship Store Galleries created the momentum that propelled his art into the forefront of historical maritime painting. A series of West Coast museum exhibitions, one of which, aboard the Star of India at the San Diego Maritime Museum, attracted more than 30,000 people; seven paintings in the U.S. Naval Museum at Annapolis, Maryland; a purchase award from the U.S. National Park Service; Fellowship in the prestigious American Society of Marine Artists; representation in the Smithsonian Institute, all of these have solidified his status as a leading authority on the great age of sail, and made him one of the very few American marine artists whose work can command six figures.