G R E G O R Y D E A N E If not for a chance offering from his wife shortly after they were married, Greg Deane might still be waiting for the paint to dry on hundreds of canvases. “I had been painting with oils until that point, and my wife had a box of acrylics she had given me,” Deane says. “I told her I didn’t think I could paint with those—I was an oil painter. Well, I painted with those, and I never went back to oils.” It’s not that Deane, a contemporary acrylic painter, has zero time or zero tolerance for the process. But he wants his canvas to keep pace with his imagination. “What I found in acrylic was I could work fast, and it dries fast, and I could layer and do things,” he continues. “With oils, I was too impatient, and I would smear them and make a mess of them.” Today, Deane doesn’t merely paint. His abstract works integrate mixed media, whether it’s a photograph, words from a newspaper or magazine, or even just bits of tissue paper. Such 74 South Bay Accent elements, he says, evoke a grounding feeling of place and a sense of time. His inspiration often emerges from the places he’s traveled, as do his materials. He gets a feel for the atmosphere or the countryside and/or the color; it’s an emotional reaction, not entirely suited to close analysis. When he returns home, he tries to present both the setting and the expressive response it sparked within him. His body of work features fields of color and organic texture paired with free movement and dramatic gesture to convey profound emotion on the canvas. Following that formula, Deane produced a series of paintings titled “Pages of Time” consisting of paper pages from Chinese and Japanese schoolbooks. It comprised as many as 40 pieces, the largest single series he has created. But the objects themselves often hold less artistic interest for him than their form. “I used to say that every time I looked at something, I never looked at it as an object; I would look at it more in terms of shapes,” Deane says. “So if a chair was up against a wall and had shadows, I kind of got that whole shape and shadowing onto the canvas— without making it a chair.” Gregory Deane, India Porta, acrylic on canvas, 4 ft. x 6 ft.
South Bay Accent - AugSep 2016
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