Raymond Elman arrived in Provincetown in 1970 when he was twenty-five. He has served as a Trustee and Officer of the Provincetown Art Association & Museum, as President of the Provincetown Group Gallery, as board member of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and as Co-founder/ Publisher / Editor of Provincetown Arts magazine. 

In 1989, after a half-lifetime of making only abstract art, he started making paintings portraying the art colony at leisure – what people do when they are not working – documenting the fabric of life in the art colony that draws people back every year.

The first painting in this series portrayed E.J. Kahn, Jr. (veteran New Yorker writer) and Palmer Williams (Executive Producer of Sixty Minutes) playing backgammon outdoors on the edge of the National Seashore – in positions reminiscent of Cezanne’s “The Card Players.”

Since then he has made over 160 paintings in this series of notable talents such as Norman Mailer, Robert Motherwell, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, Douglas Heubler, Justin Kaplan, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Dillard, Mark Strand, Sebastian Junger, Alec Wilkinson, Varujan Boghosian, Budd Hopkins, Paul Resika, Mischa Richter, Al Jaffee, Lee Falk, Anne Bernays, Jane Leavy, Daniel Okrent, Alice Brock, Susan Orlean, Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Pinsky, Knox Martin. The dimensions of most pieces are either 60 x 43 inches or 40 x 30 inches.