Reflections

I have been working on a talk I will give on Sunday, September 20th, at the Preston Contemporary Art Center. The talk will be a mini-
retrospective of the development of my art, and in going through more than 20 years of work, I am struck by the logical evolution of my technique, the enduring inspiration of the natural world, and the explorations of ambiguous perspectives of scale.

Lyra, mixed media on paper, 4 x 4 inches, © 1989 Diane McGregor

My first serious body of work out of college was mixed-media on paper. I was using watercolor, pen and ink, colored pencil and gouache to create meticulous small drawings. These pieces were only about 3 to 4 inches square. It was necessary for me to work small because I was traveling and living abroad during those years. I developed a cross-hatching technique that involved a slow, labor-intensive process of building up layers of ink over watercolor washes. I was making abstractions using astronomical photographs as a visual reference. I was fascinated by the way the macroscopic universe mirrored microscopic worlds. My images could be inspired from galaxies and nebulae, yet relate to forms that could be seen through a microscope.

Labyrinth, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, © 1995 Diane McGregor

I started painting in oils again in 1992 (this was what my formal training was in). I was inspired by living in Hawaii, on the ocean, listening to the waves tumble in at night, watching the water and it's myriad forms during the day. I became interested in illusion, luminous form, and I continued exploring the micro and macro themes. Spirals and wave forms dominated the imagery.

Morning Sounds, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 inches, © 2001 Diane McGregor

When I moved to New Mexico in 2001, the light flooded my senses, and the spirals unraveled and became veils. I was also enchanted with experiencing the four seasons again. This is one of the first paintings I created in my Santa Fe studio. The palette reflects the delicate pinks and golds of the springtime desert landscape.

Neshama, oil on canvas, 18 x 17 inches, © 2005 Diane McGregor

I started to introduce geometric elements into the veil paintings, and I became interested in using the grid.

Sahara, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches, © 2007 Diane McGregor

In March of 2006, I went to the Sahara desert to watch a total eclipse of the sun. I camped for a week with a group of Tuareg nomads. The experience astonished me and when I came back to the studio the veil imagery had been swept out of me. I began to work exclusively with the clean lines of geometry. I felt the grid was the answer to expressing the essence of Nature.

Jade Mirror, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches, © 2008 Diane McGregor

Eventually, atmospheric mists began to dissolve the boundaries of the geometric forms, and my paintings began to be more about atmosphere and color. The initial underpainting was built up very slowly with grids of horizontal and vertical brushstrokes, which eventually became so small and smooth that they dissolved into luminous clouds of color and light.


My current work has come full circle: Like those early pen and ink drawings, my oil painting technique today requires a very slow and deliberate buildup of cross-hatched brushstrokes. The work has become more painterly and there is a lot of texture. I love the flickering sensation of light and color that the layered brushstrokes create on the picture plane. The work is more minimal, and references nature and the landscape with an Asian aesthetic.

Andromeda, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches, © 2009 Diane McGregor

Building up paintings with the grids of brushstrokes has become a meditative practice for me -- it is a slow and labor-intensive process which allows my thoughts to wander into realms of transcendence and infinity. This is my most recent painting, Andromeda. The lack of lines, hard edges, and definitive boundaries imparts a dream-like quality to the painting. The ambiguous perspective invites the viewer to float in resonant, shimmering color fields.

More Mondrian

Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1929, oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

"Some of the most apparently radical aspects of Mondrian's working method in New York he had in fact refined for decades. Take his practice of working on a table and using the easel primarily to display paintings or even simply as a bare architectural element. With Mondrian, as with Jackson Pollock, working on a horizontal surface...was a crucial means of weakening, though not completely denying, the gravitational sense of top and bottom that underpins all figurative painting."
--Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings by Harry Cooper and Ron Spronk, Yale University Press (page 47)

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932, oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm.
National Galleries of Scotland.

The Reductive Impluse

Piet Mondrian, No. 9, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC

"Speaking in the broadest art-historical terms, a reductive sensibility pervades much of the avant-garde art of the twentieth century. Spanning from its earliest decades to the new millenium, a progressive aesthetics of formal clarity developed during the century in tandem with the evolution of abstraction. During the 1920s, Piet Mondrian's omission of all extraneous details from his geometric paintings was prompted by a utopian impulse that equated purity of form with spiritual transcendence."
-- Nancy Spector, from Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated), Guggenheim Museum, 2004

Returning

Returning, oil on canvas, 36x36 inches, © 2009 Diane McGregor

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always --
A condition of complete simplicity...

- T.S. Eliot, from "Four Quartets"

White Light

"It is the happiness of eyes that have seen the sea of existence become calm, and now they can never weary of the surface and of the many hues of this tender, shuddering skin of the sea."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Emanation III, oil on canvas, 29 x 22 inches
© 2009 Diane McGregor

I'm working on a new series of paintings that explore the color white and how it interacts with other hues. The titanium white skin applied over the layers of deeper color beneath express a subdued resonance, and seem to have a calming effect. I have been exploring texture and how that relates to the veiling and unveiling of forms -- layering a brushstroke over a color produces a wonderful texture with the color underneath, and with the white produces a veiling effect that has always been an interest of mine. Using the grid as a matrix, I am pursuing a project which lacks lines, hard edges, and clearly defined shapes. I love the dream-like quality and the ambiguous figure/ground relationship of this new direction in my work. I believe that the grid structure I use to develop the paintings transcends narrative and reveals a pure abstract expression of nature's essence; the continuous, repetitive action of the brushstrokes open up the painter to something beyond the conscious mind -- an archetypal truth.