Michael Gregory

Los Angeles, CA (American, b. 1955)
I’m going to talk about two parts of my work and hopefully this will answer questions about it’s form and content.  Please excuse the purple prose, I'm a better painter than a writer.

First I’ll talk about the form. These are the first pieces on canvas in about twenty years. They evolved because I’ve felt a need to work larger than a panel could reasonably provide due to weight and other factors. Formally the ground has a lot to do with the finished piece. The smooth gesso of the panels provide a finished painting that is more refined and often more luminous. The canvas on the other hand allows for a bit more physicality in the handling of the paint. The larger scale works with the evolving theme of the work and I’ll get to that later.

While the greater majority of the work in the last nine or ten years has been vertically oriented the traditional format for pictures using the landscape is a horizontal. The canvas pieces are vertical because I want to de-emphasize the landscape as a subject and draw attention to the human presence and the thin line we occupy between the convergence of heaven and earth. The previous paintings emphasized the figure over the ground.  These new works integrate the figure in the ground. The attention to this aspect makes a direct link to my table pieces and still life of the mid nineties. In that case the objects were lined up on a plane (table top) and in this case the buildings are lined up on a horizon line. One emphasized the detritus of our every day lives, these new pieces the buildings we erect and the homes (lives) we create.

In the early 1970’s I saw a show of the late Mark Rothko works on paper. Man had just walked on the moon and the images sent back were startling for their sense of isolation and loneliness. They spoke of the fragility of life and I think Rothko was profoundly moved by them as were many others. These late works in black and white or browns and white had been reduced to the bare bones and I think he by then had painted himself into a corner. These pictures generally had one horizontal division. The great emptiness he felt resulted in these final paintings. Their importance was in their ability to speak in metaphor. They weren't about the moon or space or formal surface and touch they were about a profound physiological state and mans philosophical connection with his world.

For me, and many Americans, the Great Plains of this country have provided the setting for this discussion. They represent in our collective conscience, our aspirations hopes and failures. They are the subject of literature poetry and song. This is the stage where the American drama was set. In some ways while this drama is not necessarily being played out today, it is part of our common language. It is the language and setting that resonates for me and allows me to talk about issues that far transcend the physical location.  In other words these pictures are not about place, defiantly not about  the landscape and not about old leaning buildings.

There are two songs I’ve been listening to many time over the last year and actually for the last 40. Their poetry has had a great influence on the work. They are from an early album of Bob Dylan: “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” and “Boots of Spanish Leather”. “Hollis Brown” talks about a failed homestead and the subsequent deaths of the farmer and his family and yet ends on the transcendent note of rebirth .

There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
There's seven people dead
On a South Dakota farm
Somewhere in the distance
There's seven new people born

Boots of Spanish leather talks about the separation
    of two lovers and what is really important in life:
 
Oh, but I just thought you might want something fine
Made of silver or of golden,
Either from the mountains of Madrid
Or from the coast of Barcelona.

Oh, but if I had the stars from the darkest night
And the diamonds from the deepest ocean,
I'd forsake them all for your sweet kiss,
For that's all I'm wishin' to be ownin'    
                        
                        Bob Dylan “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”

I’m hoping in this new work to talk about the dichotomy that is inherent in art and life the balance between beauty, hope and despair.   I think some of the titles give a key to this discussion.

“Long Way Home” is a picture about the difficulty of return, we spend our early years leaving home and often our later years trying to find our way back. As Tom Wolfe said “you can’t go home again”. The buildings under the dark skies are bleached bone white and empty. Often the price of beauty. “Judas Flat” talks about the betrayal of the American dream of plenty, our isolation and lack of community, the irony of the pioneer spirit that embraces independence at the cost of isolation, creativity and adventure at the cost of community.  “Fable” talks again of isolation and yet the profound beauty of a starlit night. That vision is only obtained in the "desert".  Ballads are stories or poems set to song.

In this new work I hope the poetry transcends the form and the viewer can make use of the images not as the actual thing but as a language in which to contemplate these aspects of our humanity. This is a tall order; a lot to ask from pigment on canvas.

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