Gregory McCool

“I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, as it were, and to be not quite of this world. I would like them to exist in a dream world, which I think of as being the place that they occupy, a world that is made up of the accumulation of images that we have stored in our subconscious, and that coagulate and mutate when we sleep.” – Glenn Brown

Before hazy smoke rose like dark fabric draping the crimson and gold mounds, They watched the ambient light from the Pyre glow from the Confines

Oil on canvas

120 x 110 cm

Gregory is an oil painter whose work takes the form of atmospheric landscapes which are glitched, creating an apocalyptic undertone.

His practice is inspired by the Romantic movement, where landscapes are depicted as dramatic, poetic, and moody. His work emerged during the lockdown, where isolation became increasingly hardto deal with. Using the landscapes around his home in Ireland as a canvas for emotional output, the end result is usually quite somber in presentation. This psychological influence on his work developed into a more worldwide view, where the landscape became equally about expressing individual and collective trauma. 

Between The Hills, Far Below

Oil on canvas 

35 x 35cm

The landscapes are usually vast and isolated, with human interference being limited to distant shadows. Despite being based on landscapes around his home, the non-descript nature of the scenery helps to include the viewer in feeling a distant association with the landscape. Gregory’s work creates an interstitial space between familiarity and distance, comforting and disconcerting, thus evoking feelings of eerie nostalgia. The ‘glitch’ itself plays with how one can merge digital and traditional mediums through paint. Many of Gregory’s landscapes contain a presence, which manifests itself as three figures. Their form is abstract, ambiguous, and originates from an early glitch which created them. Their intention, however, remains unknown, leading to Gregory labelling them as “observers”.

These aspects cumulate in a landscape which exists in a liminal space, where nostalgia and trauma co-exist, presented through vast rolling hills and mutated films of glitch.

the oblong lake twinkling beneath emerald hills, the Storm beyond

Oil on canvas 

35 x 35cm

In creating these landscapes, the process is quite elaborate in that it relies on the building of layers. The landscape begins as an underpainting, with progressively darker and more vibrant layers of colour added. This continuous layering achieves the very dark, atmospheric and almost hazy vision. Beyond this, each artwork may be left for a prolonged period (as many are worked on at the same time), before being edited heavily when returned to.

They noticed the beautiful verdant glow of trees after the Downpour

Oil on canvas

35 x 35 cm

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