NEW GRIDS and details

Terrain, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

Terrain, detail

Terrain, detail

My oil paintings are minimalist meditations on the infinite space and light of the vast desert regions of the American Southwest. Using the discipline and repetition of the grid, these process-driven abstractions explore ideas of order and randomness in nature and the landscape. Painterly gestures and fugitive forms float within the stillness of the grid. Foreground and background are meticulously woven together onto the painting's intricate surface. Cumulative and reductive, organic and geometric, revealed and concealed, fixed and mutable -- the elements of the composition are in constant flux toward a state of equilibrium and balance.

Terrain II, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

Terrain II, detail

Terrain II, detail

New Year : : New Work

"An emblem representing either impersonal rationality or otherworldly spirituality,
the grid offered an endlessly self-generative starting point to which the artist could return anew."
-- Susan Rosenberg, in Warren Rohrer (exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia Museum of Art), p 13.

Essence, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

My first painting completed in this New Year is a breakthrough painting, the kind of focused realization that all artists hope to stumble across as they move forward on their creative evolutionary path. I have been working with the grid since 2006. My most recent process-driven paintings have been using the grid as the foundation of the whole enterprise, in that their surfaces are slowly built up of vertical and horizontal brushstrokes. But the grid has not been part of the work in an obvious way, it was more theoretical than visually manifested. The other day, inspired by one of my favorite artists, Agnes Martin, I decided to make use of the grid as the focal point of the composition. Through the interface of the permanent with the accidental, these paintings employ the discipline and repetition of the grid while referencing the essence of Nature and the landscape. Implications of infinity and vastness echo the visual and emotional experience I have of the New Mexican landscape.

Below is a detail of Essence. The work is extremely labor-intensive, but I thoroughly enjoyed painting each little rectangle, as if it were it's own minimalist abstract painting. This work continues my efforts to bring a meditative quality to both the process as well as to the visual impact of the finished painting.

Essence, detail, © 2011 Diane McGregor

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.