To the
Welcome page and Contents list
An introduction to Ray G. VarnBuhler, not-very-famous
distant relative of the famous VarnbŸlers of Germany
and Switzerland.
Please note: changes/updates to the
information on this page were made in 2018
Ray
VarnBuhler grew up in Detroit, Michigan.
He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Design from Wayne State
University in Detroit, Michigan, and later a Master of Fine Arts degree in
Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His early career included approximately
10 years working as a professional graphic designer in New York and
Detroit. In Detroit he worked for
the three largest graphic design firms in that city, and for several years was
the art director of the promotion art department of the Detroit Free Press (one
of the 2 major newspapers in Detroit) supervising a four-person staff. He and his department received several
awards for their work during that period, and the promotion department efforts
achieved record results for the company.
While
working as a designer, he also continued working and exhibiting as a fine
artist. In addition, he taught a Creative
Thinking course in an adult evening school program for six semesters.
Between
1973 and 1998 he was a professor teaching graphic design. After 1985 he also taught computer art
and graphic design. He taught at
Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona) for six years, and from 1980 to 1998
at the University of the Pacific (Stockton, California). At Arizona State University the graphic
design program became one of the best and most recognized in the country. Feature articles about the Graphic
Design Workshop, which he initiated and co-directed, appeared in both Print
and Communication Arts, (the two foremost graphic design publications in
the USA). The students' work won
over 40 awards in both student and professional level national competitions,
and an exhibition of their work was circulated by the Arizona Commission on the
Arts and Humanities. At the
University of the Pacific his students continued to win awards, in national
computer art competitions as well as in graphic design. He developed the computer art lab and
computer art courses in the Department of Art.
Ray
received several grants and awards during his teaching career, the most
important of which was a Fulbright grant to teach and conduct research in
Turkey in the 1987-88 academic year.
A result of the research was the publication of a 13-page article,
"At the Crossroads: Graphic Design in Turkey" (Print magazine,
January/February, 1990) which showed the work of many contemporary Turkish
graphic designers. He is listed in
Who's Who in American Education, 4th Edition, 1994-95.
In
1982-83 he was commissioned to do eleven color cover illustrations for Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, a nationally circulated magazine based in New
York. He did illustrations for
several other publications as well, such as Sacramento magazine, Games,
Ranger Rick's Nature Magazine for children, and The Detroit Free
Press. His illustrations have
also been used in advertisements for Upjohn, General Motors, Ford, National
Bank of Detroit, and others.
Throughout
his teaching and professional design careers he continued his involvement with
fine art. His work was shown in several solo, group, and national competitive
exhibitions including: The Michigan Artist's Biennial, Detroit Institute of
Arts; Drawings U.S.A., Minnesota Museum of Art; several exhibitions at the
Scottsdale (Arizona) Center for the Arts; Artwords
and Bookworks, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary
Art; over 100 mail art or artist's book exhibitions in the U.S.A. and many
foreign countries; several computer art exhibitions (awards); and one-man
exhibitions at Arizona State University, University of the Pacific, and
galleries in Sacramento, California.
He
exhibited work in the following media: painting (acrylic, gouache, oil,
watercolor), sculpture, mixed media, drawing, color and hand-tinted
photography, conceptual art, computer art, artist's books, postal art,
assemblage, collage, frottage, resins, ceramics, and weaving. In recent years he has worked with a
Macintosh computer as a design and fine art medium, using graphics programs
such as Illustrator, Freehand, Photoshop, PageMaker/InDesign, and Painter.
Ray and his wife Gay have traveled
extensively. Their travel
experiences include: Turkey, Egypt, Nepal, Tibet, China, India, Sri Lanka,
Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia (Java and Bali), Thailand, Cambodia (Angkor),
Vietnam, Myanmar/Burma, Laos, Japan, Palau, Taiwan, South Korea, Morocco,
Jordan, Peru, Belize, Guatemala, Tunisia, Chile (Easter Island and Santiago), Ecuador
(Quito and the Galapagos Islands), Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, France,
Spain, Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Belgium,
the Netherlands, Great Britain; also Mexico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaii
(Kauai, and The Big Island), and Canada. They have traveled to some
countries multiple times, for example India (6 times), Myanmar/Burma (2),
Turkey (3), Nepal (3), China (2), as well as Mexico, the U.S. Virgin Islands,
and many of the European countries.
Among RayÕs many other interests are:
creativity and creative problem solving, nature, hiking, Buddhist art, Islamic
art, Asian art, folk/naive art and architecture, and genealogy.
After his retirement from teaching in
1998 he traced his family roots to Germany and Switzerland as far back as 1375,
and created this family genealogy web site.
Ray and Gay met in high school and have
been married 58 years (as of October 2018). From 1980 until 2018 they lived on
24 beautiful acres in the foothills of CaliforniaÕs Sierra Nevada mountains.
They now reside in Santa Rosa, California. They have two married children and 4
grandchildren. Ray and GayÕs
children were valedictorian and salutatorian, respectively, of their high
school graduating classes, and both graduated from the University of California
at Davis, one summa cum laude.