Tom Gregg

Olives and Martini

Objects, things that I could hold in my hand or put in my pocket, have always had a life of their own in my imagination and a powerful resonance in my world. The small toy that my cousin played with when she visited, the hat that my Father wore, the rock I always tripped on in the path to the mailbox, the coffee cup my girlfriend drank from; all these things, these inanimate, mute objects, acquired and then carried in them a force and an energy through their association with the peopled world. But it is the existence that they possess of their own, their own life  in the universe of objects and the world itself, that is even more mysterious and beguiling. I know their world has a very different sense of time, a patience and a calm that is unknown in the world of people. I can put a bowl on the table, and I can walk out of the room, leave for a day, a month, or a lifetime; each and every second filled with my struggling and straining or laughing and indulging. And when I walk back into that room, that bowl will still be sitting there on the table where I put it, dusty perhaps, but unchanged, not so much waiting as simply, and profoundly, existing. Objects exhibit a harmony, a peace and a co-existence with the world that makes the world I inhabit seem frantic and a bit absurd by comparison. This respect for and connection to objects and their perceived world underlies my pursuits as a still life painter. At the same time, the things in the paintings are there primarily to fulfill the demands of the painting itself, much the way actors are in a play to fulfill the demands of the script. Any symbolic or metaphoric intention is subservient to the formal demands presented by the specific needs of each painting. I am trying to hit a particular visual note through the combined actions and interactions of the formal elements in the painting. The paintings are an attempt to construct or discover a set of relationships that are harmonious and at the same time imbued with a hint of tension. This formal tension is heightened by embedding these abstract qualities within the illusion of the image. In each painting I attempt to strike a balance between a clear and convincing realism and a clear and charged formal construction and in so doing create a remarkable event out of the most ordinary of circumstances.