Gregory Euclide – Memories of Experience
Gregory Euclide is an American contemporary artist and teacher born in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and raised there before moving to Minnesota. His family lived out in the country surrounded by farm fields. There were ponds, gravel pits, dumps, farms and abandoned barns. It was a pretty amazing landscape to grow up in. The rich natural surroundings fostered an interest in and connection to the environment that lasts to this day. Gregory creates sculptural relief works, paintings, and installations. The end product of his art is part of an intense process. He wants the work to be a document that blurs some of the modes of representation. He reads about landscape, he walks through the woods in his back yard, he visits national parks, utilizing goods and materials pulled from the land – and all of these things are in his mind as he tries to create a Landscape Painting. He has always been interested in making the invisible visible or blending the micro with the macro. Putting found objects in the work is a way to bring something into the work that is authentic. The drawings and paintings are based on memory of experience and not of actual places. Tiny bits of moss that have fallen to the bottom of the frames nicely illustrate the contrast between organic and synthetic, making a great link to the art world and the process of making art. Some people don’t get it. They want their statements about decay to be clean and nicely placed in a frame.
