Whenever someone new visits our world-class data center space at One Summer Street in Boston, they are of course impressed by the lengths to which we have gone to create one of the nation’s strongest and most secure facilities. However, we often hear back that one of the most striking aspects of our facility is the amazing portraits of each of our employees that you see as you enter the space.
With that in mind, we decided to use this week’s blog post to shed some light on those portraits and who the artist is behind them.
These amazing portraits are done by an artist by the name of Ray Turner, whom we became connected with many years ago. In fact, Ray has been doing oil on glass portraits of our employees since 2010.
Jeff Markley, our CEO, met Ray in California in 2008 and they quickly became great friends. Ray started painting Markley employee portraits shortly after, flying out to Boston to take photographs of the employees and then returning to California to paint from them. Over the past 3 years, Ray has painted over 60 Markley employees.
One of Turner’s most popular on-going projects is his Population exhibition, which has toured several different cities in the United States and is currently on display in Wichita, KS until the end of August 2013. The exhibition is made up of several portraits of regular citizens, with varied colors, facial features and types of glass helping to make each one look completely unique.
At each stop on the exhibition’s tour, Turner adds portraits of local citizens to the exhibition. The work is currently over five hundred portraits – and when completed will be a tremendous portrait of our nation. For more information on how to see the exhibition, visit the Wichita Art Museum’s website here.
Another work of Turner’s that has recently received recognition is Good Man Bad Man, a variation of the portrait work that is made up of imaginary faces, some twisted or changed, with the intent to show several sides of human nature in each. The work was recently chronicled in a film by DJ Caruso and Jaz Nannini that shows how Turner paints his subjects after studying multiple photographs of them. The short video is available here.
We here at Markley Group are beyond thrilled to have had such a great artist bring our offices to life – and we always look forward to seeing the next project he’s working on.
