Releasing

Vidya, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

I want the light
locked inside to awaken:
crystalline flower,
wake as I do:

eyelids raise the curtain
of endless earthen time
until deeply buried eyes
flash clear enough again
to see their own clarity.


Pablo Neruda, Poem Number XII, from Stones of the Sky, Jame Nolan, trans.
(Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1987)

Vision

Yatra, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

"Only dead paintings are executed. Living ones come into being. They are a record of decisions; the sum of actions taken and reactions to them, of judgements made and of the reconsiderations and revisions that those initial judgements prompt. Painting is a process; painting is doubt; painting is the suspension of disbelief and the physical affirmation of formal and material intuitions for which there is no prior justification. Painting is what painters do while others argue about painting." -- Robert Storr, in Cage: Six Paintings by Gerhard Richter, p 59.

As I paint, I notice that it is always a process of creation and obliteration -- it's a constant give and take, choosing which marks and passages to keep, and which ones need to be removed, scraped back, or covered over. I must embrace the totality of the painting as a whole. Only then will I be willing to sacrifice a beautiful passage in order to achieve the absolute vision I have of the harmony and balance that each composition contains.

"...As with a field seasonally put to the torch and ploughed in preparation for new crops, a painting from which every vital sign appears to have been removed may be precisely that in which painting's mutable but ineradicable fecundity most startlingly shows itself." (ibid., p 60)

Exhibition Installation at Smink

These are images of my solo show at Smink, in Dallas.

Abundance

Nirjhara, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor (Private Collection, Tucson, AZ)


October Moon

Moving through transitory banks of ice
through the closing hues of night,
commanding stars to glitter;
dawn to blush.
A glow that used to emanate
from clear and lucid eyes.
But here! We are, fifty years later, shadowed in emotion.
Tasting the cool night air together.
We have collided,
against our own eternal epiphany:
I am at the beginning of life
and at its end.
Like a reflection of waves
peering back through life's skeletons
that stretch past all horizons
and sensing the words of the Great Mother
And I see the constant light of purity
In the darkness of the earth ~ at night

-- Tom Sheldon--

Toward a Romantic Minimalism

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling. - Baudelaire

Sutra, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

As I've developed my work over the past couple of years, going from very smoothly blended and luminous imagery to more textured, painterly surfaces and a focus on the underlying structure of the grid, I have sought to clarify exactly what kind of "ism" my work might fall into. My current paintings are minimalist in concept (the grid, repetition, non-objective), yet quite painterly and romantic in execution. Romanticism in visual art emphasized the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, the artist's free handling of paint, expressiveness of mood and color, intuition and emotion. Lyrical or painterly abstraction was introduced as a response to minimal art and the rigorous formalism of Judd -- the artist's touch is always visible in this type of painting. In 1967, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia curated a show entitled, "A Romantic Minimalism," which included work by Brice Marden, Carl Andre, and Ralph Humphrey. These decidedly "minimalist" artists never abandoned the surface quality of the object. Brice Marden discusses this in a wonderful interview in Tate Etc (see https://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/ofmind.htm, especially Marden's discussion of Rothko's work). Minimalism was a reaction against the painterly focus of Abstract Expressionism, but some of the "minimalist" artists working in the 60s and 70s never abandoned the presence of the artist's touch.

So I have been thinking of my work in terms of Romantic Minimalism - I use the grid, repetition, a limited palette, and no specific references to nature. However, the painting seduces with it's complex woven textures and mysterious layers of color, and I am thoroughly engaged by the gesture and quality of the individual brushstroke and its emotive and contemplative content.