Michael Gregory (artist)

Michael Gregory is an American artist known for paintings of Western landscapes, barns and silos, and flowers. His images, while detailed and realist in appearance, are composites of real-world locales and objects painted from imagination, observation and memory. Critics suggest that unlike many contemporary realists or other landscapists, Gregory avoids nostalgia, traditional notions of verity and authenticity, or irony. They characterize his paintings as mythic, allegorical vehicles for metaphysical reflection on human experience and the interior essence of places, things and ideas. Ann Lauterbach writes that he employs landscape as "a mode of human thought and imagination, dense with cultural markers and historical significance, as real as it is imagined. The American West, Gregory seems to be telling us, is in fact, an illusion, a phantom, a construct."