Collection: Gary Grissom

Bio

"I studied painting and art history at Community College of Philadelphia,Philadelphia College of Art (University of the Arts) and the University of Pennsylvania. In the 70s I was a founding member of Bricolage, a performing art collective and Wilma Theater. For twenty years I designed media for numerous theater and dance performances. My media design work lead to a growing interest in photography. During the 80s I started to exhibit photography. For the last 40 years I exhibited painting and photography. In 1990 I was fortunate to receive a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship."

Artist Statement

"I started making art in the early 1960s using my mother’s paint-by-number colors. During the 1970s, after studying art and art history, I made large paintings of color fields and grids. Color was the subject of my art. By the end of the decade I gradually felt the desire to depict objects, places and figures.
I also started to use the camera as a tool to record visual interests. Both with my painting and photography I strive to integrate and exploit the formal qualities of spatial description, color, patterning and compositional structure that I applied to abstract art.
Currently my painting is a dialog with what I see in my environment. The painting subjects have included landscapes close to where I reside and depictions of family members and activities.
My photography has birthed three unique projects. A series of reflection photographs recorded through urban glass shot at an angle. The images are a result of the reflection, refraction and light diffraction. The bending of light combines views of interior spaces with a reversed mirrored repositioned external environment. Three years ago I started recording a series of non-urban, non-suburban Pennsylvania photographs. This project is an attempt through image reportage to explore the narrative of cultural splintering. For the last eight years I’ve been documenting Lancaster Avenue and SEPTA’s Number 10 Trolley viewed as a habitat, a place to shop and a transportation artery.
It’s important for me to spend time looking at historical and contemporary art thinking about how it relates to my art practice."
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