Harold Gregor has sometimes dealt with the low landscape of central Illinois, where he lives, by emphasizing the horizon in his paintings. But in his long- running acrylic-on-canvas series called “Flatscapes,” he eliminates the horizon by adopting an aerial view. This series is based on photographs taken from a balloon or a low-flying plane. He depicts complexes of farm buildings—houses, barns, silos, corncribs, tractor sheds— surrounded by fields and rural roads. Each work is a portrait of particulars at root realistic but in effect fantastic due to the dazzling heightening of color.
In Illinois Flatscape #75, there are yellow walls and purple roofs rather than the typical farmhouse white and gray. The fields break down into high-contrast dots of various hues, nudged into patterns by the parallel furrows. The most extreme Flatscape in this show was probably #78, with its magenta, pumpkin and turquoise palette. In all the works, long shadows cast by buildings and trees suggest an early morning or (more likely) late afternoon view. Surprisingly few forms are defined by shading (often only the rounded ones); most structures are blocks of color, The sectioning order of paved roads and the efficient regularity of plowed fields relax into curves at the edges of cultivation and in farmyards. Gregor’s aerial viewpoint discloses patterns that would be harder to notice on the ground, such as the reiteration of tire tracks in the mud or dust and the lacework at the edges of fields where the tractors turn.
Neither the Flatscapes nor the four watercolors in the show, which he calls Colorscapes, give much attention to texture; Gregor seems unconcerned with the palpable. In Colorscape #75, the fields are like inkblots, both liquid-looking and saturated in hue, The farmyard ruts and the corrugation of metal shed roots, on the other hand, are recorded in distinctly defined near-dry brush lines.
Gregor is surely inspired by Matisse when he interweaves the forms of real places into a web of pattern, and even more when the environment is so drenched in color that it almost makes your teeth ache. He has taken this approach into his own vastly different world. He presents a painter’s vision of intensified color of the sort that is now becoming
familiar to us through digital alteration of photos, but which can still be the product of an artist’s unassisted imagination.
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