Gregory Lomayesva is an internationally recognized painter, sculptor
and mixed-media
artist who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Drawing from a
rich palette of personal
experience that includes his Hopi and Hispanic heritage, a wry look
at American popular culture,
and a keenly evolving aeshetic sensibility that combines abstract
imagery with razor-sharp
observations, Lomayesva's work is at the cutting edge of American
contemporary fine art.
A painter since
his mid-teens, Lomayesva's road to artistry began when he combined
his formidable woodworking skills with the classical imagery of his
Hopi heritage into fusion artifacts that rapidly developed a strong
collector base and wide acclaim. Beginning with the masks and dolls
that are staples of his historical folk-craft tradition, Lomayesva
quickly built a recognizable visual lexicon all his own that he was
eventually able to bring to large-scale works of wood, bronze, and
steel.
Expanding his output to include large-scale painting, Lomayesva began
dipping into the
contemporary zeitgeist of sampling and appropriation and took his
audiences along on a journey
to understand the totality of his influences, from Hopi imagery to
popular culture icons to the works
of the Renaissance Masters. Exploring the painting styles of the past,
he began appropriating
classical images from art history, scanning images from art books,
then finding a section to
explore further in his own work. Using an innovative photo-emulsion
process, Lomayesva would
capture the projection of the chosen image on canvass, then begin
the process of layering
meaning into his canvasses by juxtaposing these lush silver-gelatin
images with rich abstract
brush strokes, silk-screened pop culture logos, and Hopi iconography
from his own rich visual
vocabularly. In the process, Lomayesva created hundreds of canvasses
works of exquisite
beauty, thoughfulness and emotion, inviting audiences to view an inclusive
art history built on
indigenous ideas and iconography, popular imagery, and the established
history of European
classicism.
Still a young artist
at the age of 35, Lomayesva's career accelerates with greater novelty
and brilliance with every new idea and medium he tackles. His painting
subject matter and style are still evolving and he's developed a track
record for developing a brand-new style of painting for every show.
Soon after landing representation with a prestigious Santa Fe contemporary
art gallery in 2002, Lomayesva treated his audience to three successive
shows that were inadvertently a thematic trilogy of love, confusion
and loss. The first of these featured large-scale paintings of figurative
erotic images rendered in muted greys, light blue, and blacks. The
middle show featured paintings of airports and crowds, with a brighter
palette that was nevertheless muddy and almost out-of-focus, reflecting
an internal yearning for connection in environments that rarely allow
for them. Finally, the last show in the series featured canvasses
painted jet-black with geometrically perfect houses on fire, signifying
both dissolution and renewal. Each group of paintings was completely
different from the last and each other, yet each offered a sense of
symmetry and completion to the viewer and were widely acclaimed.
In addition to his fine art paintings, Lomayesva has produced two
complete albums of
electronic pop music on his label Drip Records, produced several short
films, and recently
"cloned" an out-of-production music vocal compression circuit
board from the the 1950s for his
own use and for sale as a limited edition functional art piece to
electronic music composers. With
his developing skills in music, video, film, electronics, and other
New Media, Lomayesva produced
his first environment at Studio Site in December, and has more installation
projects planned for
the future.
Today, Lomayesva boasts a body of work that includes thousands of
canvasses, woodcraft artifacts, and other ephemera, a collector-base
that stretches from the US, Europe, and Asia, and representation in
New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Scottsdale, and Santa Fe.
Within, you will find a chronological development of his work up to
the present, with announcements of upcoming shows, projects, and conceptual
works, as well as contact information for this talented and accessible
artist.