About The Artist

   The youngest of six siblings, born Derrick Anthony Raybon  to mother Goldie and father Joseph Lee Raybon Jr. at the Geary Street Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco California on July 11, 1957. A self tough artist, I was first introduced to painting and oils in particular at the age of 14 while in Foster Care and attending the singular High School in what was then the small town of Healdsburg California.

  Currently single, now in my late 60s and undergoing treatment for Prostate Cancer, I have been known to say " Michelangelo had the Pope and the House Of Medici which were patrons to such artist as Leonardo and Botticelli. Van Gogh had Theo. "I had to work".

  Among my many positions over the years, as a youth he first worked as a field farm worker picking tomatoes and cucumbers along side his siblings and step-mother in Stockton California. While in Foster Care, this time in Los Angeles, I would work summer jobs as a file clerk in a Law Office. After High school I first attended Los Angeles city collage to study Law and while there I had fallen in love with the study of Philosophy and Logic which can be seen in many of my early works of the time such as the paintings "Eviction" and "The Coin". Among the many other positions held over the years I worked as a Cashier, Warehouse Clerk and Manager, Assistant Fashion Merchandiser, Graphic Artist, Emergency Care Technician  in a major Newport Beach hospital, water damage repair and supervising freight handler for a major overnight delivery service.

Now even with the years lessening my vision, and Cancer seemingly attempting to lessen my years, I finds myself still retaining a head full of unrealized works. I has now chosen to devote the majority of my remaining years bringing to life some of those visions. .

 Among the early paintings, the works dealing with the Bosnia conflict are among those I found to be most draining and most profound. From “Eviction”, to “The Grave Digger”, from a small apartment in Los Angeles I had hoped to captured a degree of the horror and hopelessness of what many of the innocent victims must surely have felt and experienced. Sadly a horror still being felt by many others in many parts of the world today,

“Safe Haven Herzegovina” (left) with its ghost like female form rising silently up from an undesired and fluid field of death. The vulture, seen patiently waiting while perched along deliberately cut and hanging lines of outward communication. The dead tree, like the head stones holding true names of true victims of the conflict, both standing as a reminder that the land as well as man incur great loss due to the direct and indiscriminate nature of hate and war. The lame boy, aged far beyond his youth, stands next to a planted sign reading “ Safe Haven”, while silently contemplating the true world value of semantics. And lastly a Pteranodon like creature of a cretaceous era, flying freely so as seemingly to allow the viewer a momentary opportunity to examine not only how far we have come, but also to reflect on just how far we have yet to travel. Painted in 1992 “Safe Haven” is a clear example of the true quietens and questioning I attempts to brings to much of his work.