Gregg Simpson

Gregg Simpson was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1947, but grew up on the west coast. He currently lives on Bowen Island, near Vancouver. He has been active in visual art and music since the mid-1960s. Simpson’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Canada, the U.S., Italy, France, England, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, Australia and Malaysia and is included in over 100 private and public collections internationally. The west coast rainforest where he grew up and lives in today is always an underlying factor in his work, alternating with influences derived from European art, especially surrealism and lyric abstraction.

Simpson’s career has been noted and studied in several art journals, history books and academic studies done at several major institutions including the Sorbonne in Paris, the Université Rabelais de Tours, and the Accademia Tiberina in Rome.

His work has evolved from the collages and Pop-influenced paintings of the 1960s, through the neo-Surrealism of the 1970’s to an organic abstraction since the 1980’s based in both landscape and the figure. In May 2000, he exhibited at the Fortezza di Montalcino, a 14th Century castle in Tuscany, the subject of a BRAVO TV documentary in 2003, A New Arcadia, The Art of Gregg Simpson, which is now on YouTube.

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.

Gregg Simpson will be included in a new book and exhibition curated by the Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

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