Ray Strong’s professional career spanned nine decades and until his death in 2006 at the age of 101, he was active in painting, teaching, and promoting preservation of the land. He instilled a way of experiencing the land, not just viewing it. “If you want to get to know the land, go and sleep with it,” Strong said. His public-spiritedness represented by his entire body of work, along with commissions he chose to accept, continued throughout his life.

Strong's early work included Works Progress Administration (WPA) dioramas painted for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and murals for the California-Pacific International Exposition in San Diego. He had paintings in the Palo Alto Children’s Museum and the California Academy of Science, and a solo exhibition at Stanford.

In the early 1930's, Strong returned to San Francisco where he helped organize the Art Students League of San Francisco. There he studied and taught with Maynard Dixon (1879-1938), Frank Van Sloun (1879-1938) and George Post (1906-1997), and eventually opened an Artist's Cooperative Gallery. In the mid-1980’s he co-founded the OAK group – a group of artists committed to preserve and encourage stewardship of endangered lands. With annual group shows that continue to this day, they have contributed over one million dollars to a variety of land trusts.

After he taught at Marin Community College, he was recruited by the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Strong painted 9 dioramas for the Santa Barbara Museum and he remained in Santa Barbara for four decades but returned to Northern California many times to Marin County which he described as “one of the most paintable landscapes in the world.” In an article prepared for a retrospective celebrating Strong’s hundredth birthday, the writer, Charles Donelan, states “Strong’s life reflects the story of art on the West Coast that, from the point of view of the art historian, is almost too good to be true.”

A collection of Strong's 1930's paintings are now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His painting of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge was chosen by President Franklin Roosevelt to hang in the White House. That painting is featured in the June 2009 issue of Smithsonian Magazine. He accepted many commissions for public work all over California and his murals were featured in many schools and post offices throughout the state. Ray Strong's paintings are owned and collected throughout the United States.