The Origin of Fire

Escalante II, oil on panel, 10 x 10 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

Music is a big part of the creative process for me. I usually listen to the same piece of music over and over again while working on a particular painting or series. For these paintings, I chose to listen to "The Origin of Fire," a medieval chant by Hildegard von Bingen and performed exquisitely by the group Anonymous 4. The repetition -- not only from the structure of the chant, but also from the whole piece of music -- reminds me of the temporal structure of the grid itself; the repetitive process of creating each small rectangle while at the same time engaged with the whole image as a thoughtfully considered composition. The music surrounds me and inspires the contemplative atmosphere such work demands.

Escalante III, oil on panel, 10 x 10 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

The Escalante region of Canyonlands, Utah, is the inspiration for these paintings. It is my favorite place on earth. I love watching the sun rise and set over the mysterious red rock formations, and being so far away from any other living human, I drink in the silence and solitude. It is my heaven. My grid paintings are a distillation of the landscape into a living, breathing object of its own -- in this case, the red rocks, the silence, the fragile desert plants, the footsteps of mountain goats and chipmunks.... Sleeping in that wilderness brings my attention into utter harmony with the fact of life on earth and the mysteries that lie beyond the glittering stars.

Escalante IV, oil on panel, 10 x 10 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

"And I -- a human being neither afire
in my form with the strength of strong lions
nor familiar with their exhalations,
but constrained by the fragility of the weak rib
and flooded with mystical inspiration --
saw something like the most brilliant fire,
incomprehensible, inextinguishable,
all alive, and all filled with life,
having within itself a flame the color of air."

-- Hildegard von Bingen, Vision 1: The Fire of Creation,
from The Origin of Fire

Return to the Grid

This summer's extreme drought and furious fires in northern New Mexico has given me pause. It has been a time of contemplation and reassessment, partly because it has been too hot to work in the studio. I have had time to reevaluate my priorities and become aware of inner urgings that are calling me to return to the grid (see some of my earlier posts from February and March). Painting the grids, I've realized, is therapeutic for me; they are healing in their simplicity and repetition, and very satisfying in their layered complexities. There is a meditative calm that filters down to me through the process of creating them, and I trust that these positive qualities will be transmitted to the viewer. Combining these visual characteristics with poetry and titles that reflect my reverence for nature, I hope to open up the territory for spiritual insight and communion with our deepest yearnings.

Twilight, oil on canvas, 18x18 inches, © 2011 Diane McGregor

At the Twilight

At the twilight, a moon appeared in the sky;
Then it landed on earth to look at me.

Like a hawk stealing a bird at the time of prey;
That moon stole me and rushed back into the sky.

I looked at myself, I did not see me anymore;
For in that moon, my body turned as fine as soul.

The nine spheres disappeared in that moon;
The ship of my existence drowned in that sea.

- Rumi -

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]