Torie Gregory - Artist Currently lives in Rochester, NY and is a Painter, a dancer, a writer, a jeweler, a singer of songs, and mother to 4 cats. (She) I have been painting most of my life. My mother, Anne Gregory Nelson, was also a painter and got me painting at a young age. My father, Edward J. Gregory was a writer, a teacher, a journalist, a sculptor and an actor. I had a jewelry store in Chicago, with my partner Kathy Palmer, named The Silverlining, in the 1970s, where I made a lot of one of a kind original works in silver and gold using precious and semi-precious stones. I then moved to New York City in the 1980’s and studied dancing with Frank Hatchett, Madame Darvash, Bob Audy, Phil Black, and Bette Morrow, to name a few. I did my first show of my art work in NYC with Janice Jacob and Priscilla Bane Smith at 2/20 Gallery in Chelsea in 1998. I moved to Rochester, NY in 2001 to paint, reflect, and to figure out what to do with my life. Im still in Rochester and have been painting for the past 20 years now. The name of this show is “emerging from the earth dancing” which is what everything seems to do here. I am doing this show with my friend Janice Jacob who has encouraged me all along and I am doing it at Ripley-Grier Studios, owned by Butch Grier and Patricia Ripley, who have been my friends and supporters all along. Thank you I say! To you all who have loved and supported me all these many years. I hope you like this show!!!
"I'd say this show is about life and different points of view. It's about beauty that surrounds us every day in so many ways. From the mundane to the sublime it's all in the eyes of the beholder, and in the hands of the artist to see and reveal. For instance, "Apples in the sun". I saw that one morning and ran to get my easel and paints and canvas to do it right there on the spot before the light shifted... to me it was beautiful. That's why I paint. Beauty or whatever strikes a chord in me." - Torie Gregory
Janice Jacob - Artist I have been making art from the time I was a young child with crayons and paper as most children do. Our home in Iowa was filled with my great grandmother’s marvelous oil paintings and beautiful hand painted china which my father and mother cherished. My sister, Priscilla, became a painter and an art historian. My father spent hours reading about his favorite artists and took up painting after he retired. I studied art in college and visited New York City during my senior year and knew that some day I would live there. I finally made it in 1980. Prior to moving to New York I lived in St. Louis, Missouri, Houston, Texas, Charleston, West Virginia, Portsmouth, England and Obernice, Czechoslovakia. In Houston I studied lithography at the University of Houston which led to my purchase of a Charles Brand litho press when I lived in Charleston. I also had the good fortune to participate in Alan Kaprow’s “Baggage Happening” sponsored by Rice University. While in Charleston I spent one year as Artist-in-Residence at Sunrise Museum. I love to paint outdoors and was able to travel to Costa Rica many times to paint in the rain forest. The majority of my work is abstract but in Costa Rica I search for realism. Recently I began making collages which I find endlessly fascinating to construct. Over the years I have enjoyed participating in many shows around the city and in Brooklyn. Torie and I have shown together several times and I’m so happy to be doing it again with her!