GREGG SIMPSON
Painting, Works on Paper, Photography, Collage, Found Objects, Acrylic, Ink, Charcoal, Pastel, Gouache
Table Talk, 2020
acrylic on canvas
30" x 36"
City: Bowen Island, British Columbia
Website: http://www.greggsimpson.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greggsimpson8/
Artist Statement: My work involved an evolution through aspects of surrealism and abstraction. I began in the 60s as a hard-edge, Pop-influenced painter, who also did collages, drawings and multi-media. In the 1970’s I developed neo-surrealist style, which eventually worked its way to a form of lyric abstraction.
My work is on the border between abstraction and surrealism, formal design and automatism. I begin a work very spontaneously, often with the canvas lying on the ground and soaked with water to make the colors flow. Then I proceed to re-draw and mold the shapes, alternately adding and removing the layers of paint to reveal the implicit imagery. Ultimately, the painting tells me how to resolve the final result, which may, or may not, correspond to anything in nature.
My paintings are usually improvised from the beginning, with only a simple preliminary drawing on the canvas as a starting point. The eventual resolution of the painting is arrived at through the direct application of paint, while elements of drawing are repeatedly allowed to appear and then are made to disappear, until a final result emerges. The intention is to bring forward an awakening and nourishing of the viewer’s imagination.
Biography: Born in Ottawa in 1947, Bowen Island artist, Gregg Simpson, has been active in visual art, music, video and multi-media performances since the mid-1960s. He was instrumental in the early developments in Vancouver’s 1960s “golden age” of multi-media, such as the Sound Gallery and Intermedia.
His work has been exhibited in and collected by several museums and university galleries internationally. He has also been published in numerous books, journals, catalogues and magazines.
The west coast rainforest where he grew up and lives today is always an underlying factor in Simpson’s work, alternating with influences derived from European art, especially surrealism and lyric abstraction.
He has recently exhibited in New York, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Venice, Milan, and Rome in solo and select group shows.