bio

     Raymond Flores was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. In 2015 he moved to New York City on the vague promise to interview for his dream job working as a muralist and billboard painter. After completing a 14 month apprenticeship he was hired as a full-time commercial sign painter working for Colossal Media, where over the course of the next eight years he developed and refined his painting skills executing large scale hand painted murals and advertising using traditional mural painting and sign painting techniques.

     Raymond produced the first solo exhibition of his work in September 2023; a series of still life paintings executed while recovering from physical injury, in a time of self quarantine and recovery. The small still life paintings in his first exhibition were a radical departure from the massive wallscapes he had painted during his career as a billboard painter. The exhibition marked a turning point in Raymond’s life from painting advertisements outside, to focusing his work inside, creating from within himself and using the people, places and things in his lived experience to guide his brush.

     Raymond uses a foundational knowledge of paint developed during his years painting outside for Colossal coupled with a reverence for the American realist style of painting developed by the Ashcan artists of the early twentieth century to explore and define the world around him through works made with oil paint and canvas.