My name is Ray Liskauskas, I was born in a moderately sized city just west of Toronto called Hamilton in the province of Ontario Canada. During High school and well into university I started to paint. Right from the start acrylic was the main medium of choice. Originally I did landscapes and animals and as I got more comfortable with acrylics, they can be a difficult medium to work with, I found that my creative energies lead to more imaginative imagery. This ultimately lead to my fascination with fantasy and especially the works of the surrealists.

Learning more about them I gained an appreciation for what they were trying to achieve. Salvadore Dali would be initially the most prominent of these painters that influenced my work. But I gained a further appreciation for the works of Rene Magritte and Max Ernst and others, too many to mention. Not only were the surrealists an influence but I was also inspired by the works of the group of seven and specifically that of Lawren Harris. They seemed to tap into a spiritual realm that I wanted to see into.

The typical realm of the artist is usually to comment about society. For me the common thread that I find with most with my paintings is the quest for identity. What are we in this world and where do we fit in the grand scheme of things. And perhaps they are more autobiographical than I'd like to admit. That is probably why l am a painter. For me I guess painting is a search for an identity that I don't fully recognize or have achieved as of yet.