"Dining Room", 12"x16", oil on canvas paper, age 5
GREGORY S. WALSH ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST
Walsh founded the Mindbender Gallery in 2020 as a platform for promoting and selling his fine art. The physical gallery fell victim to two years of the Pandemic and was forced to close its doors at the end of 2021.
Walsh began his pursuit of art at the age of five, with his first oil painting, a still life set in the dining room of his family's home in Eugene, Oregon. Under the guidance of his mother, a Fine Arts and Interior Design Major at the University of Washington, Walsh was taught the basics of color and design at an early age.
Photo: Ivan Colin
EARLY
INSPIRATION
One of the benefits of an artist mother was that she exposed him to fine art exhibits and especially to touring abstract expressionist paintings from the New York School that were shown at the University of Oregon art museum. Those early impressions of works by Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rauschenberg, Rothko, Motherwell, and the Northwest masters, Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, were fused in Walsh's young brain and artistic sensibility.
University of Oregon Museum, Eugene, Oregon
Cornish College of Arts, Seattle (photo: Joe Mabel)
RETURN
TO PAINT
In many ways, his work is a reflection of the painters he admired from his youth. Walsh attended The Cornish College of Arts in the early 1970s, but later pursued education and a career as a filmmaker. At age 62 he returned to painting on a part-time/full time basis. The works on this website date from 2015 through the present. He has exhibited his work in solo shows or group shows in galleries throughout the Northwest since January 2016.
ARTIST STATEMENT
When I approach
a fresh swath of canvas,
I empty my mind
and allow an image to appear in my imagination.
It is a bit like the moment of deciding to leap out of an airplane at 10,000 feet.
You feel the harsh bite of rushing frigid air,
the vertigo of nothing between you
and a patchwork of earth far below.
You leap then realize you have no parachute.
That is what it is like for me to paint my abstract paintings.
Sheer guts to put marks to the surface
not knowing if the ultimate result will be a work of art,
or a messy splatter.
But it is that thrill of not knowing,
but trusting that imagination
will ultimately deliver me safely to the ground
that drives my passion for abstract expressionism.
