Greg Colson

Greg Colson (born April 23, 1956) is an American artist best known for his works that straddle the line between painting and sculpture, which address concepts of efficiency and order. Using scavenged materials, Colson allows the physicality of his makeshift constructions to intrude on the precise systems he paints or draws upon their surfaces - striking a balance between subject and context, image and support, order and chaos. Colson was born in Seattle, Washington and grew up in Bakersfield, California, in the nearby suburb of Oildale with his parents and two brothers Doug and Jeff, who is also an artist. His father Lewis Colson was a social worker but was also a skilled mechanic and inventive with makeshift repairs and adapting materials to new uses – which inspired his son's appreciation of the ordinary and the rejected. The industrial environment of the Bakersfield/Oildale area, and its accompanying attitudes and outlook, also affected Colson – particularly in its contrast to the large urban/cultural centers he would later inhabit as an artist. He received his BA from California State University Bakersfield where he studied with George Ketterl, Ted Kerzie, Michael Heively, and visiting artists John McCracken, Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha, James Turrell, and Ed Moses. From 1978-80 he attended Claremont Graduate School, studying with Tom Wudl, Michael Brewster, and Roland Reiss and earned his MFA. During the 1980s he apprenticed for artists Vija Celmins, Ruscha, and Wudl. In 1987 he had his first solo exhibition with Angles Gallery. Colson currently works and lives in Venice, California with his wife, writer Dinah Kirgo. Colson's diagrams and maps speak to the detached, abstract quality of much human analysis, at the same time smuggling social critique into each work. Roberta Smith of The New York Times described Colson's 1990 debut exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery: "In nearly all of Mr. Colson's works, the combination of modesty and grandiosity, of mental exactness and physical imprecision adds up to an odd, sad beauty.