Lakeside Studio

Greg Constantine: Career Narrative
	I have taught painting, drawing, and art history at Andrews University for thirty-seven years while conducting fifteen art history summer sessions for students in Europe. As my exhibition record reveals, I began exhibiting nationally in 1969, and since 1975, numerous one man shows including seventeen in New York City that have dealt with Art about Art. It is very possible that my involvement in the teaching of art history and the intensification of artists dealing with other artists' work have resulted in this similar theme recurring in my own art. The focus of my professional career has clearly been the exhibiting of my art in New York City, and as a result, a moderate reputation has developed. From 1972 to 1978, my painting involved squeezing paint tubes in horizontal lines directly on the canvas to create large television images. The rendering of famous artworks through this horizontal matrix gives a curious effect to the appropriate art works such as "La Grande Jatte" and "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" when distorted by the corresponding T.V. aberration. This same tube squeezing was used for the Jackson Pollock works and the American Landmarks that followed in 1978 and 1979, except that the marks are curvilinear and random. In 1980-81, my effort was totally given over to creating authentic-looking license plates which appeared as if the artists had had the opportunity to design their own personalized plate, visual signature and all. For example, these "Artist Licenses" are all white for George Segal, all black for Louise Nevelson, wrapped for Christo, splattered for Pollock, smashed for John Chamberlain and melted for Dali. From 1982 to 1986 my work dealt with drawings of famous artists coming to well-known American cities. Exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Chicago the drawings were published by Alfred A. Knopf and Chicago Review Books as Vincent van Gogh Visits New York 1983, Leonardo Visits Los Angeles 1985, and Picasso Visits Chicago 1986. The drawings are rife with references to contemporary art and culture, art history, and the life of the artists themselves. Considerable documentation of the references in the end matter of each book makes them curiously educational.
		Beginning in 1983, I worked concurrently on a series of constructed paintings I call "slices of art"; wedges of famous paintings that include the frame. The "greatest hits" series are works made up of an accumulation of slices of well-known paintings by a particular artist juxtaposed together in a rectangular composition. The "inside-out" paintings feature the frame more than the previous work to the extent that the image area attracts the eye less than the frame does. In some works, there is an attempt to confuse the distinction of the frame from the canvas area. A subsequent series deals with famous artists' self portraits which become curiously schizophrenic when sliced. The next generation of work involved the combining of two split portraits (and their respective frames) resulting in a strange yet curious new personage which unmistakably still refers to the artist's self portrait and the female model. Following, the next series of works deals with half of a face from a familiar artwork, (e.g. Botticelli's Venus), juxtaposed with the corresponding opposite half of a very different face taken from art history, (Picasso's Demoiselle). While the distinction between the two halves is obvious due to the impossibility of perfect alignment or coloration, the viewer's brain, and not the eye, resolves these differences. Despite the irony of the combined image, the resultant face maintains the attributes and even the identity of each of the component halves, hence the title, "Messing With the Corpus Callosum. "With a variation on the theme, I continued to combine two faces; half of famous artist's self portrait along with the actor who portrayed him in a motion picture; e.g. Vincent van Gogh with Kirk Douglas, Paul Gauguin with Anthony Quinn, Rembrandt with Charles Laughton, and Picasso with Anthony Hopkins. More recently, my works are images half of a Vincent van Gogh self portrait combined with a black and white painting of half of a photograph of Van Gogh. The architectural series of paintings and drawings recall the works done for my books in 1983-1986. Well-known artworks are integrated or juxtaposed with a famous building, e.g. Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao seems to be reflected in the water, but the reflection is actually a distorted "Guernica" by Picasso. The latest works deal with enlarged details of hair from old master paintings combined with elaborate frames