Love Song

Lily, 2009, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches
© 2009 Diane McGregor

Once in a while I'll fall deeply in love with a new painting, for no reason in particular. Lily is one of those paintings -- she's kind of quirky and simple, light-hearted and sweet. She's going to the framers soon, destined to be shipped off to a gallery in Scottsdale, and put up for sale. Sometimes I wish I could keep these small treasures, the ones that really grab my heart. But I believe that a collector should always have the chance to acquire an artist's best work -- not that this little painting is "the Best," but just knowing that she's out there, available, makes the heartache of giving her up a little less severe. When someone eventually has the good taste to purchase Lily, I will be thrilled, knowing she's in a home that loves her and will truly appreciate her. I wonder if collectors know how artists feel about these things, giving up their "babies" for money. I wouldn't have the privilege to continue to paint if I didn't sell my favorite pieces, and usually each painting I create becomes my new "favorite" just after I complete it. It's often hard to let them go, but perhaps if more collectors knew the gratitude and fulfillment that an artist receives when a painting sells, then they would understand it's never just about the money. It's about living, loving, painting -- it's about supporting a life's work.

Dream Journey

In the trembling grey of a spring dawn, when the birds were whispering in mysterious cadence among the trees, have you not felt that they were talking to their mates about the flowers?
-- Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

Alabaster Sky II, 2009, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches
© 2009 Diane McGregor

The Southern Song period of Chinese landscape painting (1127-1279) is the work that most inspires my own aesthetic. The following quotes are from Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape, by Valerie Malenfer Ortiz:

"The most remarkable aspect of Song landscape painting was its role, comparable to that of poetry, of guiding the scholar-viewer toward a deeper understanding of the truth that lies beyond the forms.... To the scholar-elite of the Southern Song, landscape paintings of the type epitomized by Dream Journey embodied the highest philosophical truth." (p 7-8)

"One of the most significant aesthetic qualities of pictorial dream journeys is that they lift the place dreamed out of the normal category of experience. The blurred quality of the flickering images seems to deny the separateness of the objects these images represent." (p 156)

"The business of landscape painting -- nature's principles revealed as a process of transformation that reveals the operation of perception -- is to evoke a moment of contemplation, wherein man might discover his just relationship to an often inexplicable world." (p 156)

Alabaster Sky, 2009, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches
© 2009 Diane McGregor

"Poetic knowledge mediates between understanding and being. It does not consist in a precisely defined style but in an emotional identification with the intuited nature of being....Concentration on poetic effect opened the viewer's mind to li, the organizing pattern of the cosmos." (p 157)

"The ideal of the Southern Song painter was to transcend his own materials and his own ego, so that the form of the object breathes itself upon the paper or silk, with the painter serving as a kind of medium between Nature and painting." (p 158)

My minimalist abstractions reference nature and the landscape, but in a poetic sense, not a literal translation. The dream journey I take through the landscape to find my connection to the cosmic whole is very much grounded in the Asian aesthetic of painting.

Spring Snow

Sensing, 2009, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches
© 2009 Diane McGregor

I finished this small painting the other day, and for some reason was compelled to title it Sensing. I just knew that that was its title. In nature, there is an automatic response to the physical stimulus of light that induces birds to migrate. I kept looking at this painting, thinking it reminded me of spring, or the fragility of spring, the forms still converging and perhaps being obscured by the elements. Then, last night, the snow began. It fell on the plum blossoms, the red tulips, the delicate grape hyacinth. Covering everything, until this morning I awoke to over a foot of snow. I now think I could sense deep within me, on some sort of primal level, that snow was going to fall, a lot of it. Like migratory birds, I was connected to nature on a deeper level and responded to the inner urging, to follow my instincts when it came to titling the painting. This is where abstraction leaves me breathless with wonder -- I didn't know where the painting came from, or how it arrived, or why I was so certain of its mysterious title.

Whisper the Luminous

Over the past three years my work has been a journey of transformation. Each step of the way has brought me closer to a mature relationship with my work that I have sought for decades. I've gone through a series of geometric compositions, learning about structure, light and atmosphere. I've mastered color through my recent ambient light series, which are minimalist meditations on the luminosity of color. Most recently, I explored new territory with texture, learning about layering and the expressive possibilities of the brushstroke and palette knife. Through it all I have maintained a devotion to the grid, and its potential for transcending the narrative and revealing nature's essence.

Whisper the Luminous, 2009, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
© 2009 Diane McGregor

This is my latest painting, and I believe it incorporates the various elements I've been exploring. There is the grid, deconstructed and reconstructed as form in the figure/ground relationship. There is an elegant minimalism that I've been chasing, that I feel is successful in this painting. The shimmering color field simultaneously holds the forms and dissolves them. Painterly areas of texture and saturate color are left as remnants of the original grid underpainting, contrasting with areas of pristine, flawless blending. And the luminosity of color creates a resonance that fills my heart with joy. The title of this painting, Whisper the Luminous, is from a poem by Hafiz, the mystical Sufi poet.

Cézanne

I've been thinking a lot about Cézanne lately, probably because of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibit, "Cézanne and Beyond." I have a fascinating exhibition catalogue called Cézanne in the Studio from the Getty Museum. It goes into exhaustive scholarly detail about the importance of a single watercolor by Cézanne, Still Life with Blue Pot. As I consider the Philadelphia Museum's extraordinary view of Cézanne's influence on modern and contemporary artists, I have been reflecting on his contributions to the evolution of abstract painting.

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Blue Pot, c. 1900-1906, watercolor and graphite on paper,
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA

As the Getty catalogue emphasizes, although Cézanne's world was one full of representational "objects", his canvases revealed the psychological and symbolic correspondences between the object and the viewer. Cézanne's work demanded "recognition of the two-way relation between the inanimate objects of the genre and the animate world of the human subject looking at them, of the set of exchanges, substitutions, and affinities that take place in the studio between the human body and the world of things." This is abstract painting in a nutshell. In abstraction there is only the color, the forms, the light, and the dark, which come into play as "objects of the genre"; the paint handling, bold or soft, invites additional psychological interpretation relative to the viewer's position -- emotional and intellectual. The fact that the artist is both the creator of the image and the viewer, gives Cézanne's self-conscious authority an almost mystical presence. I find this to be the most captivating and compelling dynamic of abstract painting.

(Above quote taken from Cézanne in the Studio, The J.Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, p. 66)