Contemplating the Horizon

Terrain IV, oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

Inspired by the ethereal nature of the vast desert spaces of the American West, my abstract oil paintings are minimalist meditations upon the landscape, the light, and the elements. These images are not representations of a specific place or environment, but a synthesis of shifting visual impressions, contemplative observations, and a meditative process.

My painting process involves building up many layers of vertical and horizontal brushstrokes in a grid framework. This gives the composition its stability and structure. Brushed and scraped textures reference those found in the landscape and on weathered rocks and ancient surfaces. Subtle variations of the color white, including soft grays and pale ochres, symbolize the spiritual essence of the desert for me: purity, clarity, infinity, peace. Natural earth and mineral pigments emerge from the hushed white fields, creating a richly layered, mystical interpretation of these elusive desert realms.

Synthesis

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

My project involving the grid has been instrumental in moving my paintings forward. After producing 4 of the rigorous grid paintings (see posts from earlier this year), I have found a thread that I can hold onto: Landscape. The new work I am doing has a more pronounced "landscape" feel to it -- I am focusing on compositional elements that are abstract yet have some reference to the desert and my environment -- the light, the land, the weather, the seasons. I feel more "anchored" somehow. I have lots of new work in progress in the studio, both large and small paintings, and I am excited about this new (yet subtle) direction I am following. It is a synthesis of all my experiences with oil paint, textures, and layering over the past few years.

White

"Like a Bedouin who can make out the subtlest shades of sand or an Inuit who can read with precision a comparable narrow spectrum of snow and ice, Ryman has catalogued white's actual variety, thus ironically demonstrating its latent non-neutrality when seen in relation to itself." -- Robert Storr

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

White is the most important color on my palette. I use it as a color, not just to depict "light." Its relationship to other colors is remarkable -- it is always influenced by the quality of any given pigment, and yet white always retains it's own weight and structure.

One of my favorite painters, Robert Ryman, had a love affair with white that has left us with a whole new vision of what white, as a color, can be. In all of its delicate and subtle evocations, white in Ryman's paintings conveys strength and majesty.

From Suzanne P. Hudson's marvelous book, Robert Ryman: Used Paint, she observes:

"Ryman came to insist on the realness of paint (white and otherwise) not as pure color but as a marker of its effects. A painting would be an orange painting or a white painting because of the demonstrable behavior and sensible qualities of the paint that was used to actuate it. Color here is not an abstract essence or language game but the physical effect of the paint in which it is suspended. [pp 60-62]

"Painting white paintings was something Ryman had long disavowed, as when he answered a question about this is 1971:

No, it may seem that way superficially, but there are a lot of nuances and there's color involved. Always the surface is used. The gray of the steel comes through; the brown of the corrugated paper comes through; the linen comes through, the cotton (which is not the same as the paint -- it seems white): all of those things are considered. It's really not monochrome painting at all. The white just happened because it's a paint and it doesn't interfere. I could use green, red, yellow, but why? It's a challenge for me to use paint and make something happen with it, without having to be involved in reds, greens, and everything which would confuse things. But I work with color all the time. I don't think of myself as making white paintings. I make paintings; I'm a painter." [pp 247-249]

Terrain

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

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichen and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Mary Oliver, from Twelve Moons

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