NYAB Event - Jon Gregg “Recent Paintings”

Jon Gregg “Recent Paintings”

The New York Studio School

This event has ended.

As founder of the Vermont Studio Center in 1984, Jon Gregg has spent the past 30 years in a “utopian adventure in creative world community” building what is now the largest International Artists and Writers Residency in the U.S.

During these same 30 years, Gregg, an architect who studied with Louis Kahn, has painted and drawn continuously but has shown rarely. His last show in New York was in 2004 and in Art in America, Robert Berlind, wrote “the tension between the formal aplomb of these paintings and their anxious edgy poetry, accounts for their arresting power.” Writing in Il Giornale Dell’ arte, Lucio Pozzi wrote “from these paintings is born a sense of absolute concentration always on the edge of collapse, weaving paths of tension and contemplation, the latter based on the artist’s 45 year involvement with Tibetan Buddhist practice.”

The 14 paintings in this show, [all oil on canvas, 48” x 56”] emerge from an extended process of a year or two of painting images in and scraping them out over and over again, expressing whatever appears through a vigorous technical approach that blurs the boundary between painting and drawing. The narratives are abstract and only partially revealed and how they are created becomes part and parcel of what they are ostensibly depicting; with no illusion of total control, but instead presenting an intensely personal cosmos in formation filled with figures, masks, villages, cities, and landscapes in which order is not imposed but allowed to evolve.