Transformation

Rajin, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

"The simple aesthetic requirement by which art should picture the inexpressible developed into a highly complex and comprehensive repertory of artistic principles and technical rules. One of the most significant sources for Southern Song poetry criticism, Yan Yu (1180-1235), defined the poetic as follows:

poetry excels by its transparent luminosity.... It is like echo in the air, color in form, the moon reflected in water, or an image in a mirror; words have limits, but the meaning is inexhaustible.

A painting that matches this goal does not simply illustrate poems by means of narrative motifs easy to recognize; rather, by its subject matter, composition, and ink technique, it carries an expressive charge beyond its forms so that one can recognize moods and an emotional atmosphere that are of a sympathetic nature as in a poem."

Above quote taken from Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape by Valerie Malenfer Ortiz, page 65 (Brill, 1999).

Awakening

Bodhana, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

All landscapes have a history, much the same as people exist within cultures, even tribes. There are distinct voices, languages that belong to particular areas. There are voices inside rocks, shallow washes, shifting skies; they are not silent. And there is movement, not always the violent motion of earthquakes associated with the earth's motion or the steady unseen swirl through the heavens, but other motion, subtle, unseen, like breathing. A motion, a sound, that if you allow your own inner workings to stop long enough, moves into the place inside you that mirrors a similar landscape; you too can see it, feel it, hear it, know it.

-- Joy Harjo, from Secrets from the Center of the World

The Meditative Surface

"A painting with a meditative surface turns in on itself..."
-- Carter Ratcliff

Bandhu, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

Through the language of repetition and the grid, my work explores the physical presence of oil paint from a minimalist perspective. Formlessness rises within the grid -- there are no lines, no edges, no allusions. Gesture and brushstroke arise as agents of introspection and quiet contemplation. Artifacts of composition are carefully considered, and are either retained or released in service to the harmony of the whole. Within a matrix of layered brushstrokes, the weights of color and texture, light and dark, are delicately balanced and intuitively measured. The lush, deliberate surfaces of these paintings convey both a meditative stillness and an energy force of controlled chaos.

New Moon

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

The moon was new yesterday, an auspicious day to finish another major painting, Devamuni.

I am honored to announce that I have joined forces with SMINK in Dallas, a company that specializes in exquisite contemporary furniture and objects from the Como Region of Italy. They will be expanding their fine art division, and I am looking forward to showing my work with them.

I had a lovely studio visit with Jennifer Smink last week, and this painting was still in progress during our meeting. Having just completed it yesterday, it will be one of the paintings I will be showing at Smink later this fall in a solo exhibition.

Summer Flowers

The pain will be born from that look cast inside yourself, and this pain will make you go beyond the veil.

-- Rumi

Suma III, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

The surface
of the water
mirrors many things.
-- Masami Kato (1825)

Suma II, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

...[T]he inner risks to the psyche that the best artists face every time they make work are much harder to quantify and to judge with dubious terms like "good" or "bad," "success" or "failure." This is the inner dimension of art, far beyond the reach of critics and curators. It is the path of practice, of doing, of riding the crest of the wave of the moment with no thought as to where it will land, or whether there are rocks just below the surface, or if the Self will survive the fall. This constant falling, the incessant quest for some unknown thing beneath, beyond, or just out of reach...
-- Bill Viola, "Artist to Artist," in Art in America, February 2010, p 64.

Suma I, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2010 Diane McGregor

On the whole, however, modern art is not a denial but an affirmation. Like most of our scientists, the process of disintegration or analysis is not a wanton act of destruction but part of a process for the evolving of more comprehensive synthesis. And therefore modern artists have not left us merely with the members of the body of art strewn about, but they have reassembled them and revivified that body with their own breath of life. In short, they have attempted to regain a synthesis as complete as that of the primitive, based of course, upon contemporary considerations and point of view.
-- Mark Rothko, The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art (Yale University Press, 2004), page 61.