In her most recent paintings, Gail Gregg explores geometric abstraction through a variety of found supports and collaged elements. In her reworking of such homely, everyday objects as a chicken crate lid, cardboard packing forms, wine box dividers and plastic packaging, she transforms the mundane into paintings of off-beat beauty. They speak to the possibility of transformation, humor, and the quantity of trash generated in 21st Century America. Finally, they remind us not to take even the simplest things for granted.

Gregg also takes this interest in the humble object into her work as a photographer, a collage maker and her most recent body of drawings, made using orphaned photograph albums found in flea markets and junk shops. She removes the photographs and, using graphite or pastel, replaces each snapshot with a kind of ghost or echo of the original. As she wrote in the catalogue for the 2010 Beach Museum exhibit, The Album Series: “My hope is that this new “non-photo” communicates a sense of loss, a sense of the tenderness with which important benchmarks in a life are recorded – and, finally, a sense of possibility.”

Currently Gregg is repurposing other flea market finds, creating collaged tableaux of 1950s family life using magazines and ephemera of the period. For decades, landscape painting was a primary focus for Gregg, both at the micro and macro level – in particular the precise and inorganic checkerboard survey grid superimposed on the rugged landscape of the American West.

Gregg also writes for ARTnews magazine; teaches workshops in encaustic painting; and teaches and mentors young artists.

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http://www.gailgregg.com