Tom Gregg
Tom Gregg hit his stride in the early 2000s with colorful, glossily realistic still-life paintings of everyday objects on tabletops. Gregg’s inviting subject matter ranged from food and drink to drugs—a bowl of cherries; a Big Mac on a plate; cigarettes in a glass ashtray next to a partly drained whiskey glass; a glass of water and scattered pills—arousing consumerist desire while eliciting awareness of potential harm from overindulgence in various vices such as fast food, smoking, drinking, and pill popping.
Although inspired by Pop art and the appearance of products in advertisements and store displays, Gregg crafted these paintings in the studio working from direct observation. He carefully arranged and lit his objects, then rendered them in detailed drawings and subsequent paintings executed with thin layers of oil paint applied to gessoed birch panels. Presenting his subjects in frontal, centered views to give them an iconic presence, Gregg heightened their allure by picturing them against bright colors laid down in three horizontal zones. These zones signify the front edge of the table, the tabletop, and the background wall, while simultaneously functioning as nonobjective color fields of the kind employed by abstract painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland. Yet Gregg’s zones of color were, like his still life objects, painted from observation, from bright fabrics that he incorporated into the overall set up of his still lifes.
Prompted by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and high-profile corporate scandals, Gregg in 2003 produced a compelling series of still lifes critically addressing “power and masculinity.”1 Memorable paintings included Let’s Roll, depicting a red plastic gasoline container against a blue backdrop; Flag, showing a crumpled American flag on a gold table top against a green backdrop, suggesting “money colors” (a painting ironically purchased by the Harvard Business School); and Fat Cat, a decadent masculine composition of silver bucket and tongs, amber-colored cocktail, cigarette, and lighter, which Gregg calls “my CEO painting.”
Gregg’s most recent series, the smallformat Knots and the large-format Unknowns, depict bright, monochromatic fabrics wrapped and knotted around spherical objects and presented against subdued backgrounds. While originating in Gregg’s concern with current events—an early, red knotted headlike form responded to the much-publicized beheadings of Western hostages by Islamic terrorists—these enigmatic and beautiful paintings ultimately transcend topical commentary to emphasize visual perception, aesthetic refinement, and the possibility of broad, metaphorical interpretations.
—David Cateforis
