Gestural Works and Abstractions by Guy Grogan
Showing My Stripes #1, mixed media on gesso board
Artist Guy Grogan creates gestural works and abstractions that seem infused with deep feeling. Working in paint, drawing, and sculpture techniques, Guy uses a distinctive color palette and a talent for building volumes to evoke mysterious concepts.
I’m really enjoying looking through the works in Guy’s Showing My Stripes series. The works here are easily defined as abstractions, but upon closer inspection seem to be built upon figurative elements, detached and fragmented from their usual meaning. The stripes of color that move across each substrate are mottled and textured in a way that calls to mind wood or metal construction materials, with narrower, in-between strips of color taking on the look and feel of rust, glue, or any number of other connective tissues.
The front page of Guy's portfolio website
Guy’s drawings are an interesting departure from his paintings – most of the artist’s drawings depict human figures. In the series Lily we see the same subject, a young girl, depicted in a variety of poses and settings, all rendered in a pleasingly loose fashion that almost, in an interesting parallel, calls to mind the drawing style of a child.
Lily in the Yard, pencil sketch