Lisa Wray

Lisa Wray, an American artist, is the daughter of an electrical engineer and her mother an opera singer. She was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania in 1956. As a child, her mother took her to art classes at the Chester County Art Association. This experience left a profound impact on her decision to study art as a vocation. Her father was instrumental in her decision to study graphic arts as he believed she would have a difficult time finding employment as a fine artist. Wray graduated from the Hussian School of Art, Philadelphia PA in 1979. Here she studied commercial art and the basics of fine art where training was based on a solid foundation of mastering these classic studies: drawing, painting, illustration, color & design, perspective, photography, advertising, typography, printmaking and art history. She was a freelance artist in the late 1980's, and owned a print shop with her first husband, Thomas Pratt. The marriage ended in 1987. In 1989, she married Angelo Mazzanti (a Marine, former Carlson's Raider) and in 1990 they moved to State College, PA.

For four years, while living in State College PA, (before and then during the beginning of the time period when desktop publishing was becoming a reality), Wray was developing her fine art style which she calls “Renaissance of Metaphysical Imagery®”. Prototypes were made for each work from color copies, color photos or film negatives made in her graphic arts darkroom. In 1990 she visited Raphael Digital Transparencies in Houston Texas, and Dodge Color Laboratories in Washington D.C. to study the viability of assembling the first two prototypes, Brew of Life and Fantasy on computer. The first two works were assembled by Dodge Color Laboratories on a Superset machine that was first developed by the Department of Defense. Final art was archived on 1" magnetic tape, and then output as an 11x14” color film transparency

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