A WOMAN OF COLOR "I paint in color. I live in color. I breathe in color."
art for our time
About Greta
Her History of Color
Art is an expression of color, fantasy, and passion. Discovering color when my parents sent me to Saturday morning art classes, my life was transformed. Pastels, watercolors, oil paints, and brushes became a very shy girls best friends. The smell of medium and pigment was intoxicating, allowing me to retreat into a world colored by me. Along with white gloves and finishing school manners, my parents gave me creativity, curiosity, artistic and political awareness.
Her Dreams in Color
As a painter of dreams, I have taken those gifts to the places I read about under the covers of my bed lit with my father's flashlight. Living and studying in European capitols of art and architecture amid the Renaissance of art in Firenze, the Carribbean and the rocky silences of Northern New Mexico I have developed a sight through the eyes of a dreamer.
Always finding color, music and love in everything.
Her Art with Color
Colors of Kente cloth, Zimbabwean Shona art, Bearden, Lois Mallou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Derain, Leger, Jean Cocteau, Miro, and Picasso My work incorporates influences from modern painters as well as indigenous tribal colors and patterns from Leon Berkowitz, the Washington Color School, Henry Jackson, Jack Whitten, and Oliver Lee Jackson. I create, write, and live to make the invisible visible.
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Her Statement
The narrative of one’s art is a living document, evolving in phases. My practice, without any conscious help from me pushed visions out of my soul lingering for years. The most important lesson I have learned has been to get out of my own way and let the art lead me.
I am drawn to artists, male and female whose sensibilities are able to look intimately at the feminine mystic Women express openly among themselves emotion and spirituality. The meaning of feminism is having unparalleled physical strength to quite literally push humanity forward. Feminism silently and most profoundly influences my work. Women are the species I know best. I am from Washington, DC., lived in New York, New Mexico, and Italia.
My work is abstractly real. The techniques are driven by classical art “isms”, indigenous tribal art and a mysterious ancestral DNA. I spend time reading, studying, and collecting mentors to further my art.
My influences include Wilfredo Lam, Picasso, Matisse, Leon Berkowitz, Alma Thomas and contemporary artists who converse with me about art, politics, and concepts of life, Lillian Burwell, Jack Whitten, Oliver Lee Jackson, Akili Anderson, Jimmy James Green, and Patricia Michaels.
I‘m driven to tell the story of my time through the eyes of a Black American woman, a feminist, activist and global citizen.
Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”
Alma W. Thomas
