June 16, 2020
June 16, 2020
Designer Details
New Mexico Artist David Grey Talks Color, Shape & Inspiration
Guided by daily mindfulness, New Mexico-based artist David Grey looks to color and shape to define his digitally manipulated graphics. A university professor, his large-format works are an ever-evolving exploration of vibration and form meant to both ground and uplift a space. Each specially framed to bring museum-quality dimension to the wall, several of Grey’s beautifully eye-catching and thought-provoking pieces recently launched with Four Hands Art Studio. Read on to learn more about the artist behind some of our most exciting new art arrivals.
Four Hands: Please describe the sources of inspiration for you, when it comes to your visual work.
David Grey: I’m inspired by light, color, rhythm, and harmony. Stillness and vibration fascinate me. I’m enamored by James Turrell’s use of light, how Mark Rothko released the essence of color, and the transcendental forms of Agnes Pelton. I love folk art, thangka paintings, and teachings on the basic space of phenomena. But my biggest source of inspiration has always been nature and music.
FH: How would you describe your aesthetic in your own words?
DG: New Mexico Wabi Sabi…Pop Tantra…Josef Albers meets Aphex Twin meets the Queen of Sheba. With all kidding aside, I describe my aesthetic more as a process. I explore Graphic Design as Contemplative Art. I make artwork that is intended to both ground and uplift the space in which it lives. My large format prints are meant to be experienced day after day as a visual form of meditation.
FH: Color and shape seem to play a large part in your artistic process. Can you speak to their importance in your pieces, and what draws you to color and shape?
DG: Color is everything to me. It’s an experience. It’s perceptual and relational. It can push and pull a space or shift your emotions. It can create a sense of harmony or dissonance. It can calm or distract the mind. It can even heal the subtle energy body. I explore color the way a musician explores sound. I push it, pull it, layer it and spend countless hours making color relationships that resonate like music. I use form in compositions to vibrate qualities of basic duality; stillness and movement, balance and tension, foreground and background, this or that.
FH: Of the several pieces recently launched with Four Hands Art Studio, which is your favorite, and why?
DG: My favorite piece is Expansion XL because it’s the final print in a series of 40 variations made in a single summer morning. The collection unfolded like the evolution of a song, each print being both a replication and alteration of the previous one. The scale of form is magnetizing to me and I love how you can hear the color palette’s tone.
FH: When you created that 40-variation series, what moved you to do so, and in one day?
DG: I’ve learned over the years that beauty is not a finished state, it’s an ever-present sense of perception. My creative process is motivated by the coincidence of opposites. I make one “relationship of contrast,” then I make another and another and another. I mindfully wander through this intuitive flow until my emotions resonate a sense of harmony and then I listen. I listen with my heart, not my mind. I find so much joy in this. I save the work as a digital file, and then, just like a sound engineer, I change one relationship in a subtle or great way and continue the process. This can go on for hours and hours. Treating the artwork like a song transforms the creative process into a blissful transcendent dance.
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