oil on glass
18.5" x 14.5"

I lived in Detroit, Michigan with my mother, father and three sisters for twenty-five years. While there, I learned about and worked at many jobs concerned with the automobile industry. When I left Michigan, I was a working artist in what is known as the Cass Corridor, where artists made art and did not talk about art. I then lived in Chicago, Illinois, and worked as an assistant printer from 1973 to 1975 at Landfall Press. It was there I learned about color—it was there where I was finally sure that I would be a painter, not a teacher or printer.

Tired of the large, dirty, crowded cities of my life I moved to Portland, Oregon where I found that I could not escape the art inside of me. Throughout my career as an artist I have concentrated on the “Face of Woman”—moving slowly toward the figure with special attention to the hands, never thinking I would even sell these pictures—I just kept making them. Growing up in an emotional world, I use this emotion of my life in the life of my painting.

- Gregory Grenon