Grace DeGennaro’s work has been internationally exhibited at galleries and institutions and is included in permanent institutional and private collections including the Tang Teaching Museum, Heckscher Museum, Gund Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art in Ireland. She lives and works in Yarmouth, Maine.
Image: What are some of your earliest aesthetic and spiritual memories?
GD: My early aesthetic memories are related to music. My mother was a classically trained musician, and one of my first memories is of attending a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in which she was singing.
Sacred music, stained-glass windows, the soaring architecture of the cathedral, and the wafting incense at weekly Catholic mass with my family gave me a sense of the existence of both the visible and the invisible.
Image: Most abstract artists have begun as figurative artists, with some memorable exceptions like Ad Reinhardt. Have you always been an abstract painter?
GD: As an undergraduate at Skidmore College, I began drawing and painting from the figure and still life. I was also fortunate to take a course in color theory with a professor who had been a student of Josef Albers.
Grace DeGennaro. Passion, 2022. Oil and cold wax on linen. 34 x 34 inches. Photo: Luc Demers.
In 1984, I entered the MFA program in painting and sculpture at Columbia University with the goal of turning inward and working abstractly. While there, I studied twentieth-century fiction and poetry through a historical feminist lens, which became a wellspring for imagery in my work. I was especially inspired by the novels of Willa Cather and the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. At Columbia, I also began to cull images from my dream journal, a practice I continue to this day. Identifying dreams as a source for my work marked a defining shift in my previously perceptual studio practice.
Another turning point toward abstraction was seeing the controversial 1984 exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art. I began to independently study Australian Aboriginal art, Indian Tantra art, Indigenous weavings, and Tibetan mandalas.
Image: What were some of the earliest formal elements that you incorporated into your mature works, and are those still present? Can you describe how you settle on these motifs, and whether their religious origin or connotations play into your decisions as a painter?
GD: I began using geometry, symmetry, pattern, and transparent color in a generative process twenty-five years ago. I continue to use these formal elements and an abstract, nonlinear perspective that reveals the spiritual rather than the physical geometry of space.
Layering ancient geometric forms from both Eastern and Western cultures illuminates symbols of the past and brings them into contemporary visual culture. For example, I make paintings and drawings that focus on the symbolism of the circle within a square and the relation of each to
Photo: Jerry King
a vertical and horizontal axis. Circles symbolize the cosmos, and squares delineate the spatial directions in our physical world. The cross is an underlying symbol of the four cardinal directions as they relate to the unfolding of the seasons, the turning of the day, and the four ages of man.
My current series, Immutable, is inspired by the geometric similarities between two seemingly different works: the compositions of Tibetan mandalas and the cross-sectional blueprint for the dome of Donato Bramante’s 1502 Tempietto in Rome. Both feature a circular sacral area surrounded by a square; both are aligned on axes. These paintings and works on paper share a meditative quality evoking stillness, balance, and harmony—the very characteristics that the Tibetan mandalas and the Tempietto seek to awaken.
Image: You prepare your canvases in a very special way. Can you talk about your process and materials?
GD: The painting supports are stretched with linen and primed with rabbit-skin glue and an oil primer. The weave of the linen is still visible and, for me, evokes skin. The first inviolable layer of paint is brushed on with a cold wax medium. A second layer is composed of opaque or transparent geometric shapes in a symmetrical composition. The third and final layer is a matrix of opaque beads or dots.
I always begin a series by making watercolor drawings. I then choose one or two drawings to begin a series of paintings. I make decisions about scale, composition, and transparency in the drawings. It helps to begin the paintings with this information, because my painting process is oneof layering and accretion as opposed to subtraction. The drawings do not help with color decisions in the paintings, because the drawings are usually on black paper and more diagrammatic. During the painting process I will sometimes stop and make additional drawings. The drawings inform the paintings, and the paintings inform the drawings. The work on paper and paintings are of equal importance in my studio practice.
Grace DeGennaro. Three Pillars, 2024. Oil and cold wax on linen. 55 x 55 inches. Photo: Luc Demers.
Image: Some of your series, like Platonic Solids, have specific philosophical reference points. Do you have particular philosophical lodestars who orient your work?
GD: In sacred or philosophical geometry I found a visual language that reflects the simple but profound mathematical ratios found in nature, like the golden mean, which often determines the dimensions of my work. I also employ the Fibonacci sequence—a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers—as a framework to plot patterns marking the natural processes of growth and time.
Image: Many modern women abstract painters have been given short shrift in art history until recently. Are there any female precursors you especially admire?
GD: The works of Monir Farmanfarmaian, Emma Kunz, and Hilma af Klint have always resonated for me. I hold Agnes Martin’s sublime grid-based paintings and her unique devotional practice in a special place in my heart.
Image: Some abstract painters, especially Rothko and Reinhardt, insisted their work could only really come alive when visitors spent extended periods with it. How much time do you think it takes for a viewer to really get your paintings?
GD: As a supporter of slow art, I believe that the time spent making a painting is communicated to a viewer and can influence the amount of time a viewer chooses to spend with it. In public installations I always request that a bench be provided, to encourage increased viewing time.
Image: In an attention economy, with so much tugging at our attention, how can painting compete, and should it?
GD: A painting is a place of stillness and resonance. I want a painting to possess the radical clarity of an icon. In the relentless pace of our contemporary culture, the fact that a painting does not move is where its strength and value lie.
