Duane Cregger
Duane Cregger is a contemporary artist who lives and works in the mountains of Virginia. His work hangs in galleries in Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio, and in private and corporate collections in Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland, Ohio, D.C., North Carolina, northern California, the Caribbean, and eastern Europe. For more information, contact the artist.Artist Statement
"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity." -- Carl Jung
It is this play instinct that Jung speaks of that leads me to use a variety of oil paints and thinners, working on canvas or wood. Occasionally, I will add a rough layer of plaster and dig into it before it dries, then paint over the rugged surface. Often, l'll use a seemingly finished work as the underpainting for another piece, contributing to a deep layering of color, texture, and emotion.
I am influenced by the historical styles of abstract expressionism, neo-abstraction, and formalism. I seek to present the tension between states of constancy and new growth in abstract ways that evoke a feeling or idea that can't be fully described, but is intrinsic to the human experience.
Critique
"Thick oil paint surfaces applied in loose rectangular patterns in Duane Cregger's 'Untitled with Pink III' and 'Post 108, No. 2' are inscribed with Cregger's personal scribbling, the effect of which anchors these abstract works in language, or perhaps architecture."
-- Ray Kass, Curatorial Essay, Exhibition Catalog for From These Hills: Contemporary Art in the Southern Appalachian Highlands
www.raykass.com
"I defy anyone to look at Duane Cregger's heavily textured oils and not wonder how the effects are achieved. Start envisioning the process that brought them into being, and the paintings take on an auditory quality: scratch ... scrape ... knife ... grate. Cregger's larger canvases heap lush mounds of pigment, but always with control. Incised designs shimmer on their surfaces and unify the composition. Cregger is most successful in the realm of pure abstraction. One or two paintings work a simplistically rendered flower or fish into the composition .... Far more satisfying is the brilliantly colored and vaguely sad, 'Reverse Alchemy;' so is 'Bell Case,' whose rectangles recall the improvised fields of Gee's Bend quilts. Cregger proves equally skillful with a restricted palette. 'Lilac Beneath' is a light-colored, monochromatic canvas whose scratched surface alternates between sensuous curves and soft rectangles that look like nothing so much as vertebrae of a large animal. Its tones are equally alive: warm, glossy white, with touches of lime, orange, and violet that radiate from below, like the fire in a good opal."
-- Rebecca Jones, URGE Magazine, Gallery Reviews/December 2008
"This stuff is fabulous."
-- Barbara Kinney, Photographer, www.barbarakinney.com
Other Press
Artist Presents Work to March of Dimes of Virginia Citizen of the Year
"Great Room," Richmond Home Magazine, March-April 2009
William King Museum Opening Reception, A! Magazine for the Arts, October 2009
'From These Hills' Boosts Profile of Appalachian Artists, www.GoTricities.com, January 2010