Artists

Michael Gregory is an American painter known for richly detailed, photorealistic paintings of Western landscapes, barns, silos, and flowers. Though his images appear true to life, they are composites drawn from imagination, memory, and observation rather than direct depictions of specific places. Gregory received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1980.

Critics have noted that, unlike much contemporary landscape painting, Gregory's work avoids nostalgia or irony, instead functioning as an allegorical vehicle for reflection on the interior essence of places and things. His paintings are distinguished by a luminous, largely muted palette of whites, grays, and blacks, punctuated by moments of vivid color. Gregory has described his images as icons in the traditional sense — vehicles for meditation rather than illustration, built from a collage of personal observation, art history, and cultural memory.

Gregory's work is held in the collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Boise Art Museum, and the Delaware Art Museum, among others. He lives and works in Bolinas, California, and Rhinebeck, New York.