hen I called Greg to ask him about doing an interview, he was preparing for a show and could hardly talk. He answered the phone with a barely audible hello, so tentative, like he was trying on the word for the first time. Like he was cursing the phone and anyone who was foolish enough to call him in the midst of his orgy with the pallette. (“I hate the telephone. I hate dentists. And I hate barbershops. Always have and always will.” Greg. There is a small plastic skull glued to the receiver of his.studio phone.) Like most serious artists I know, when Greg is in his studio, surrounded by his paints and frames and sketches and memorabilia, and the flux of his possession is upon him, he doesn’t want to be distracted. It’s not easy to carve out the space for that communion with your muse. When you’re in it, you sort of hang on for dear life while the forces of your vision are pulling you towards the unknown. And with the other hand you are trying to get it all down, record it, freeze it in a moment's snapshot. Outside the moment, it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. And when you’re reminded that it does, you resent it. The possession is almost compulsion, a delicate balance of unconsiousness and consciousness. Since we’re friends, Greg agreed to let me do the interview. Normally I wouldn’t have pursued it. The moment is too precious and I respect it. Then I thought, a bit selfishly, what better a time—catch him when he’s on fire. I banged on the door of his boarded- up storefront studio and was met by a barking Trouble. Greg’s dog Trouble is half Australian Shepherd and half Dalmatian, one side of his face black and the other white. Between commands to “Shut up!” he follows us into the studio and is ushered out into the back yard. Greg is a big, passionate man, about 6' L'and probably 250 pounds. One’s first impression is that he carries most of that weight in his upper back and head and his hands. He grew up in Detroit and Chicago doing mostly heavy-duty warehouse work. “Before I became a painter, I used to talk with these,” he says, referring to his fists. There’s a clipping from a Chicago art paper which tells of Greg decking a local art professor/gadfly, putting him in the hospital for three days with a concussion. “I ran out of words in an argument and so I asked him if he’d ever heard of the Golden Gloves. He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and 1hit him just once.” Painting has become a relief valve for some of Greg’s anger. In 1967, in Detroit, Greg was going to a junior college, taking a variety of liberal arts classes. Thumbing through a book one day, he came across some abstract expressionist lithographs. He was captivated by the color and the line, and thought, “Boy, I’d like to try to do something like that. So I signed up for a lithography course. “I’d never even taken a drawing course. But the teacher I met was so cool. He helped me so much about art. He answered all the dumb questions you always have. And I just kept doing it [lithography] and I got really good at it. I got a job in Chicago as an assistant printer at Landfall Press. And that’s where I met some big-time artists. 1went to art school for awhile, but I dropped out. I didn’t like sitting in class and painting with other people. I liked going in and doing it when nobody was there. “1976 was the year of my personal revolution.” He was on one of his last unemployment checks and got invited by friends out to Portland for a month’s vacation and fell in love with the area. He went back to Chicago, fixed up his ’-58 Ford, rented a trailer and arrived in Portland with $1.35 in his pocket. “I needed to change my life and I didn’t want to move to another big city.” He had already Jived in two big, “nasty” cities, Chicago and Detroit. He later tried New York for awhile and was in shows and became part of the place. But he didn’t like competing with people who thought they had something to prove. “I don’t desire to compete with that crowd. I got nothing to prove. It’s a head-fuck, you know?” It's not easy to carve out the space for that communion with your muse. When you're in it, you sort of hang on for dear life while the forces of your vision are pulling you towards the unknown. And with the other hand you are trying to get it all down, record it, freeze it in a moment's snapshot. One unique aspect of Greg’s work is that he paints on the back side of glass and plexiglass with oils. He has a fondness for windows in their frames as canvases, or found objects that could serve as borders with caulked-in plexiglass. “I saw a windowed door one time [in 1973] and decided to do a painting on it. Then I did several more on glass and I liked it. I liked the hard surface.” The curious part of his modus oper- andi is that he draws a sketch of the painting onto the back of the glass with black oil crayon and then lays the glass down on a table on its face and stipples and daubs and hits the paint onto the back of the glass with a loaded brush. “That’s how I paint. I pound the brushes against the glass.” The women all have some kind of attitude, a barely suppressed emotion just faintly drifting across their faces, but so charged that, along with their gestures and the intensity and delicacy of color, one can't help but feel a latent explosiveness. To look at the painted back side, you would barely have a clue as to the effect or shade or texture that is going to show from the front, the bare side of the glass. The painted side looks like a choppy sea of muddied color. But the front side, which he can’t see while he’s doing it, is the total opposite, glistening with a purity and delicacy. It’s as if a fairy waved a magic wand and turned the ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. “I’ve been doing DANCING THROUGH Artist Gregory Grenon is represented by Jamison/Thomas Gallery in Portland and New York, and by William Traver Gallery in Seattle. His illustration for the story “Body Surfer” appeared in our Winter ’84 issue. it so long I know what the effect is going to be.” Another important element of Greg’s paintings has always been his frames. Painters have long been at a loss as what to do with their finished canvases and have ofttimes treated framing as an afterthought, a necessary evil of sorts. They began to just leave them off altogether or continue the paintirfg around the edge of the canvas. Frames became superfluous. Greg’s paintings were some of the first I eVer saw where the frames seemed to be an essential part of the whole package. Frequently the frame comes first. He will find something in a junkyard or second-hand store which is some kind of border with character; a metal-tubing gate with metal curlicues or part of a metal door or some kind of industrial frame-like object. Sometimes this becomes not just the painting surround but the inspiration for the theme of the painting itself. “I see the frame and then I get the idea of what I want to do in it. I treat everything as a found object, even the frames that I build myself. I had someone else build me those frames over there, but then I bang them around a little and caulk them. When I see the frames, then I see what I want to do with them.” Sometimes, when his pallettes start to get too muddy or the paint too stale he recycles the paint. “Instead of throwing it out into the environment, I scrape it all off and mix a little varnish with it and put it on the frames.” In some of his paintings there is an ambiguous gender identity. “This is a picture of a man. Sometimes I do pictures of men and people think they’re women. When I try to paint men, they become women a lot of times. The times I’ve tried to do sculptures, I’ve tried to do women, but they become men.” Undeniably, however, women predominate as subject matter. Women in dresses. Women in blouses and An Unrefracted View of By Keith J gowns. Women in their underwear and sexy lingerie, their arms akimbo or crossed across their chests. Staring out at the viewer with haughty or pouty or coy expressions. (I comment on how sexy and erotic a lot of this work is. “My work is erotic. There’s more bodies in this batch, though.”) They all have some kind of attitude, a barely suppressed emotion just i faintly drifting across their faces, but ; so charged that, along with their ges- ; tures and the intensity and delicacy of color, one can’t help but feel a latent explosiveness. I think this is one key to the powerful quality inherent in Greg’s paintings. It is his own explosive passion, teasingly cloaked in a delicate expression. But even without that ability to catch a gesture, a look, and put heat in it, the paintings wouldn’t be what they are without Greg’s inherent and learned sense of color. First and foremost, painting is about color, and Greg can make it moan and purr and ache. And the glass seems to give it an extra freedom to show its essence. “Do you ever use a model for any of these?” I ask. “Not in the classic way. I get too distracted,” he replies. I’m thumbing through some news photo shots and various clippings of people Greg has lying around. One shot shows a painter in his studio doing a large-scale sketch of a nude, red- haired model sitting in a chair. The color of her skin is that of rich cream, peculiar to some redheads. “Nice model, huh,” says Greg. “Yeah,” I respond, “beautiful hair.” “I’d like to have her in my studio when 1paint,” says Greg. “I wouldn’t paint her. I’d just lick her skin.” We move around the studio looking at his paintings. “Tell me about this one,” I say, stopping in front of a large painting of a woman in a formal. “Denise! Denise!” says Greg. “I have a friend who gets these gorgeous little girlfriends who hurt him, do him wrong. They play with him and get him all antsy and then leave him. That’s one of them right there, Denise. I remember her just from memory. The last time I saw her, she had a prom dress on. She’s very gorgeous.” “Nice cheeks,” I add, “beautiful oval face.” “Heartbreaker,” says Greg, “little heartbreaker.” Another painting has two women looking haughtily back at the viewer, one with an off-the-shoulder blouse and the other in a sweater. “Nice looking girls,” 1comment. “Bad girls,” says Greg. “These are girls that you meet at a party or out at a bar or something and you want to dance with them but you’re just not cool enough for them. They don’t even know who you are. Till they find out who you are they don’t want to have anything to do with you. That’s been the story of my life. Then if you become somebody, then everybody wants to dance with you or be part of you, you know? That’s a lot of bullshit. People don’t accept you for the way you are. That’s the kind of look they give you, ‘What are you doing in our space?’” He shows me another painting of a standing pregnant woman, nude. This view is from about six feet in front of
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