Gregory Kondos: A Passion for the Land

male Walking through the underbrush near Peturnell Mountain in New Mexico, Gregory Condos is a man on a mission. He is a landscape painter, and he has come to perform a ritual act that is by now, second nature to him. He is hunting, a scene, and once he has found it, he will attempt a feat of magic. When I go out in the field or in the studio with a blank canvas, I feel like a magician.

There is nothing there. And then I said, there is something there. It came to life. And it is somewhat scary. You know, you are faced with a blank wall, and you have to make it happen somehow. And then once you get into it, it becomes real. I have broken through that barrier, and I have put something down that wasn't there. I have created a new image in life. Funding for Gregory Condos, a passion for the land, has been provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, by the following arts organizations, and by these additional underwriters.

For Gregory Condos, painting is a way of exploring the world. His intense curiosity has led him into a multitude of landscapes, from the levees and farmlands of the Sacramento Delta, to the canyons and maces of the Southwest, and from the pine-shrouded mountains of Exxon Provence, in France, to the blue and white islands of the Aegean. Significantly, Condos responds with equal passion to almost every landscape, favoring no one place over another. I enjoy all the areas I've been into. I don't give one more importance than the other. I can be any place like in the Southwest, or I can be in France, I can be in New York, I can be on the coast of Maine. It's just that I'm really led by the most important teacher

out there in this nature. You know, last year, I was in New York, in the wintertime. I bundled up and went to Central Park, and I worked in the snow. The snow was coming down, and I was doing oil pastels, and the snow, and I just enjoyed that tremendously. And I just feel comfortable and happy that I can do things all over the world, and it's all one big picture. I honestly think that Gregory Condos loves being out of doors. He loves the search for a sight. He loves the variety of landscape. He's having fun out there as a painter, as well as working very, very hard, and very seriously. And he seeks out beautiful places. One of the things with Greg Condos is that he is unashamedly dealing with beauty in the landscape. And so it's very logical to find him in the mountains at the shore. That's what he's about.

He's looking for beauty in his painting. Beauty has been much maligned in our times, in the 20th century. Perhaps because it has been a century of many horrors, the two world wars, the Holocaust. But on the other hand, I think that it is now being introduced again as a subject in criticism, and it needs to be addressed. Someone like Greg, who gives us a view of nature that is beautiful, nature intact, nature in the whole, provides us with a kind of subject of contemplation that strikes very deep cords within us. I really think the drive to find beauty is an innate human drive. Music Gregory Condos' deep love for natural beauty

was awakened in childhood. He grew up on the outskirts of Sacramento, California, and he spent much time along the rivers and sloughs of the Sacramento Delta. When I was a kid, I used to fish the Sacramento River with my dad. Somehow I got lucky and ended up with a little rowboat that I found for about $25. I used to go out there and just sit in the boat by myself, throw my line out, and just look at the landscape, and I didn't care if I cut a fish or not, really. But I wasn't a painter then. I wasn't even thinking about art. I just felt the magic of that landscape out there, and I felt that, wow, look at it. How beautiful, how it changes, and how these shapes, you know, move around with the water when it ripples. And so, finally, when I began to paint, I saw my past flesh before me, and then I recognized all these shapes again. Music

It would be several years, however, before Gregory Condos would begin painting the floating world that fascinated him as a boy. The Second World War intervened. He spent four years in the Navy, much of it on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. It was there in the midst of war that he began to think seriously about becoming an artist. And plenty of time, my hands, actually, and carrier flights. So I used to doodle a lot. I used to sit there and draw, and I was just doing it the past the time when I had that free time. And then, finally, I realized that I had some talent, and then my crew mates around me, they would say, you should take this up once we get out of here. And so I said, hey, maybe arts my calling, and that's where it all started.

Music The son of Greek immigrants, Condos was concerned that his hard-working, practical-minded parents might not approve of his decision to become an artist. But they said, go for it, and that was unexpected because they were immigrants with very little education of any. And I'm very grateful for that because they could have stopped me from being an artist. They could have said, oh, come on, look how tough we've worked. And here you're going to go out and gamble with life, and what it has offered you. But they didn't do that. They gave me their blessing, really. And every move I made, they were interested in it. And my competitiveness was there, and they saw it. And whenever I'd win a prize, they were proud. Music After the war, Condos studied at Arts Center in Los Angeles

with the intention of becoming a commercial artist. He soon discovered, however, that he was more interested in fine art than commercial art. What Arts Center did for me was taught me a lot of discipline. And thank God for that, because it made me aware that things aren't that easy, you know, that you just don't slide into this thing called art. Condos left Arts Center and returned home to Sacramento, where he continued his studies at Sacramento State College. While in Sacramento, he met another young painter who was to become an important artistic ally, as well as a lifelong friend, Wayne Tebow. Their initial encounter took place at a clothing store where Condos was working as a salesman. My first impression of Greg was as a member of the Mafia, the Greek Mafia, I guess. And he was dressed very, very well, somewhat snappy. I had no idea he was an artist at all.

He was selling shirts and a very good salesman. The idea of him being an artist came slowly. I knew that he went to Arts Center in Los Angeles, a school, which I think is a very fine school, which I wanted to attend, but I didn't have a chance to go to art school. So I was interested in the fact that he had spent time there. And that gave him, I think, a good, kind of professional grasp of basics. In the early 1950s, the art community in Sacramento was very small. And Condos and Tebow spent much time working together. They eagerly explored the visual world, painting a wide range of subjects and carrying on a rich artistic dialogue. We began to become even better acquainted and used to go out and actually draw and paint for the gallery, trying to get a hold on something as strange as the art world.

But I think the thing which manifests itself in terms of something really important was the act of painting itself, painting and drawing. And this out shown almost every other consideration. We didn't have the scene here that would motivate you to paint early or become a painter because there were very few painters out there, active painters. Luckily, I had a good friend Wayne Tebow around and we would go out and paint together. And we would challenge the same composition. And he would do it his way, I would do it my way. It was very clear that when you went to work, you simply worked. Better put a lot of time in. And I think what's of primary importance to note how much you have to do to get only a little bit. When we worked together, it was always painting.

It was serious painting. It wasn't just getting out there and playing. We'd get out there and work. And then we'd come home, tired, but happy, you know. There's nothing better than to be tired from painting. Believe me. It was during this time that Gregory Condos encountered the work of the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. The first of several historical figures he would come to regard as important mentors. Through Gauguin, Condos was inspired to use color more expressively and to take more risks. Gauguin helped me tremendously, mainly because he was pure enough and creative enough to make a choice like white paint, sand, tan, or brown, or whatever you want to call it, or neutral. He'd make a pink sand out there someplace.

He'd make a yellow Christ. So I said, I'm going to follow Gauguin a little bit here and see if I can just make a mood or create a space with other colors. And so I took chances. I took enough chances to make my paintings come to life. Condos and Tibo were also excited by the great changes that were transforming American art in the years following World War II. They were eager to participate in the contemporary art scene, but to do so, they had to look beyond Sacramento. Mostly the activity center on San Francisco. So we used to spend a lot of time going to San Francisco, just participating in exhibitions at San Francisco Museum, Modern Art. We're looking in the Bay Area, and here are these collected artists that had reputations. Wow, look at that David Park. Look at that, Stephen Carter, that fish off. But we were at Orange Link because we weren't in the Bay Area scene.

And finally, competition came around, shows opened up where you can compete against them. And we'd get in there and win, or we'd be side-by-side with them. At the time we were pursuing our own exhibition, we had to acknowledge the fact that we were greatly influenced from outside movies. We were very interested, extremely interested, in what took place in the development of American painting, called Abstract Expressionists, painters like particularly William DeCuny. All of us had a kind of love affair with him, I think, because of the abstract gestures that he used. We were looking at the scene in New York, and the action was in the abstract expressions at that point. Pollock didn't affect me very much, but deCuny did, because all of a sudden, I figured, hey, this guy's on a skateboard. Look at how fast he moves around that painting.

So I felt that same energy, I needed that kind of energy. So I changed brushes, I went from little brushes and small canvases to big canvases, and I took house brushes, and all of a sudden, I'm skating around this whole thing, and my paintings became fresher. They became more alive, they weren't tortured. Inspired by William DeCuny, condos became more fluid and expansive in his style of painting. At the same time, he began opening himself to another influence that would prove just as liberating. After years of discomfort with his Greek heritage, he started to embrace it. I was born to a Greek family. We talked Greek in the house. Everything seemed to be Greek around me, and sometimes I rejected that feeling, because I didn't want to be considered ethnic, like, hey, this guy's a Greek, and so forth.

And it was tough in those days. Everybody was kind of picked on the Irish, anybody that tied in, she named it. And here I am also being picked on, and so I just want to be a person. And then finally, I said, I would think I'm going to be a Greek painter at that point. I finally found my roots. I was proud that my background was Greek. Now in touch with a deep current in his life, condos made a fateful decision regarding his entry into the 1961 Winter Invitational Exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. And I chose to do a Greek painting, which was the ruins of Greece, and I put together something which I had never seen, and I just felt, I won. I won one of the big prizes. They had ten of them. I got one of them. And every well-known painter was in that show, and I felt that, hey, I'm on my way. And so I think it was that painting that made me decide to go to Greece

and really look around. For condos, the imaginary Greek landscape shone like a powerful beacon, calling him in a new direction. And as thoughts of Greece fired his imagination, he felt increasingly restless in his teaching position at Sacramento City College. By 1963, he knew it was time for a change. I went to school, I just said, I want to leave a vapsons. I'm just going to take off and disappear for about a year. Condos was determined to spend a year in Greece, and he was willing to go to considerable lengths to realize his dream. So I had to get money. Well, here's this beautiful house. I just put together. I sold it. It didn't bother me at all. It was just a material thing. And when you talk about risk-taking, I took a good risk by upgrading my family

from a nice home setting, schools, and so forth, and saying, I was selfish, really, and saying, no, I've got to get out of here. I've got to go and find something. Something's missing. For Gregory Condos, the journey to Greece would be a turning point. During the year he spent living there with his wife and children, he was to gain many new perspectives on his life as well as on his art. I was just captured by the beauty of that country, and the kindness and generosity of the people. And I was so taken by that that I just forgot about painting. I just, well, it's too short of a time. I want to enjoy the country. He went there and tending to come back with Greek paintings. He packed three trunks of art materials, art supplies, and never opened them

once he got there because he just looked. He went out to the ruins that kept so long and stretched out and watched the play of light and color on the sea. He was a visual sponge for ten months. I did very little painting or drawing, but I was observing everything. I was looking at shadows. I was sleeping on ancient ruins sites just to watch the sun, or watch the color and the sea change from bright blues to pale blues to silver. I remember him telling me that when he got there, he was so struck by the strong blue and white. The blue of the sky and the sea, the white of the simple, almost geometric buildings. I think this was something that almost burned into his mind.

I remember him saying, now he knew why the Greek flag was blue and white because, in fact, that is Greece. It is blue and white. I think it was really increased that Greg found a part of himself that he perhaps didn't even know was missing. He found a wonderful rocky landscape. He found churches sitting on the flat, open plains. These wonderful geometric structures. And he also found a culture from which he came and an identity in a sense that linked him with great art of the past. One of my favorite stories about Greg is one that Darrell Forney, who is the Sacramento artist of the colleague of Greg that Sacramento City College told me he told me how when Greg went to Greece, he would go to the village where his parents were from in Greece

and go to the doorstep of their home and pick up the dirt, the actual soil and bring that back to his relatives here. He has this great, earthy connection with the soil. It was in the ancient world of the Aegean, Kondo insists that he became a human being. It was also there that he began to gain his mature artistic vision. In Greece, he became more attuned to forms in the landscape and to the way in which they are defined by light and shadow. After years of using gestural brushwork to create abstract visual effects, he now found himself becoming interested in objects in space. I finally realized that I may not be painting the right thing at home. I may have to think differently and then the whole attitude changed at that point and finally I realized that there are things like shadows and brown form, solid form

and it took a good year of concentration and finally I came back to Sacramento and all of a sudden I became an object painter. I would definitely do the object, paint the object, think about the object and so my work took on another meaning at this point. It became solid. Gregory Kondo's return to the United States more solidly grounded, both as a painter and as a person. I came back from Greece actually as stronger and probably a more serious painter. It just changed my whole attitude towards painting. So that meant research. I had to now put together a program of investigation. I began to read on people like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and many books on Paul Cezanne. I enjoyed the impressionism.

But again, when you just work with light, that's not enough. Then Cezanne came in with what we call the solid form. Putting that in with light makes the painting. So my strength of the landscape came after, I think, in 1963 when I got back from Greece, then, all of a sudden, I became a painter of the landscape but in a more Cezanne, as I guess attitude, you know, make sure that you get the light and you get the solid form. As Kondo surveyed the landscape around Sacramento, he was attracted to the Delta region where he had spent much time as a boy. With his new interest in objects, he was particularly excited by the many interesting structures found along the Sacramento River. When you drive along the riverbank, you find different little things to work with.

It could be a pump house, it could be a water tower. I've always been attracted to white objects, like maybe it's from Greece, the idea of these white buildings, and the purity of it, and when I see a mansion up there and painted white and reflections of the water, I react to it. Trying to get this thing together in a more solid idea that I generally do because it is direct. It's like one-on-one, it's a house, levee, and shadows, trees. It's actually got a lot of information. It's a good challenge. When I work in the Delta area along the rivers in the valley of Sacramento,

I have to adjust myself to a horizontal attitude. When I look at the river, I have to think straightens the horizontal lines, something that pulls to the left or the right, and then my introduction is the tree, or maybe a Victorian house across the river, and then hope that the interest also happens in the water. I'm trying to redraw now with color, so you have to kind of re-work your areas, get back into it, but not with charcoal this time. Just see if you can develop this in a shaded fashion in this time with color. Great group on the edge of Sacramento as it was developing, and on the other side of what he saw was the great expanse of the flat Central Valley.

Later on in his life, he went into the Navy and was on an aircraft carrier and was surrounded by the great vast flat expanse of the sea, coming again back to Sacramento to the flat valley. I noticed that when he went to Cezanne or went to Hopper, he went to works by those artists that were as much about space as they were about the landscape. The great space over a body of water, a bay, for example. Greg's paintings have a very solid base, Wayne Tebow, in describing them once, talked about the golden mean, where you have this wonderful, stable relationship of the parts of the painting. You have the big sky, then you have the tiny band of details along the river, and then you have the secondary support pedestal of the river itself.

It gives a feeling of solidity and strength to the paintings. He loves to take that horizon line also and elaborate the horizon line. We will see very simplified water below, and I'm talking now about Sacramento River scenes, above the very wide sky that you see in this area. Then right along the horizon is where we see really a center of interest that cuts through there and reinforces the horizontality. As he continued to explore the floating world of the Sacramento Delta, condos also began to isolate and monumentalize objects in the landscape. In this, he had much in common with his friend Wayne Tebow, although Tebow embraced the imagery of pop art, while condos remain devoted to the landscape. When I go out and work in the field,

I generally look around for an object that I think I can somehow put it into focus as the main part of the painting. And I looked around when Dane, I saw these beautiful hay stacks, and some of them were isolated by themselves out in the open field, and to me, they were like the cubes of butter. It gave me a feeling of something big like on a stage. It was out there by itself, and the light that was hitting it became gold. And I said, I'm going to do it. I'm going to put it in the middle of the canvas or over the side wherever it works, and I'm going to give it all I can to make it more than a haystack. I just try to do a canvas painting. In Europe, they were like the cupcake haystack or that little tent-like form. And over here, we have this cube. And it just made me feel like an American haystack painter

instead of a European. If Gregory Condos' interest in isolating forms and monumentalizing them reflects a particular tendency in post-war American art, it also expresses a deeper personal reality. To monumentalize a form, an object, I think is to me, my nature, I'm a loner. And I've moved throughout my life this way. There's a definite sense of solitude, a kind of almost existential loneliness of the lone observer relating to nature. His landscapes are seldom inhabited. The figure does not play a part. He speaks often of how is a child growing up in Sacramento. He would go off on his own alone and just walk by the river or sit in a boat

and just look at the river. That sense of essential loneliness in the landscape, I think, is a hallmark of his work. He is a self-described loner. It's very hard for people who know him to understand that because he's a tremendously energetic man. He's a great character. He's almost self-invented in his personality. But if you look across his work, you will see not only that theme of open space, but certain pictures, for example, the lifeguard, which is literally emblematic. It is almost existential. It is a solitary lifeguard in a tower, looking at to see the tower and the lifeguard and the dead center of a large canvas that is otherwise empty. There is a solitude in his paintings. There's no doubt about that. They create a private space for the viewer.

It's not so much a lonely space as it's a private space. He's part of a great tradition of American landscape painting, and of course, one of the artists that may come to mind when looking at condos is Edward Hopper. Hopper shares with condos a flatness of color, mass, a simplicity in his work, a winnowing out of detail, and a kind of solitude as well that he shares with condos. There are some wonderful signature paintings of houses and space by both artists. Having made the initial trip to Greece in 1963, condos was eager to return to the Aegean and to continue his explorations there. In subsequent years, he made many trips to Greece

and his feelings of connection with the ancient world grew ever stronger. I feel like a Greek over there. I feel that I'm in an ancient world. So I feel like an ancient person sometimes, you know, working in the Greek landscape, and I feel like I'm bringing back life to the ancient world. I paint in different parts of the world, and I do it my way. And that is by trying to understand that place. Greece to me is totally different than California. It has a clarity about it. It is much different than what we have here. It has a simplicity that finding creeps into my even California paintings. When I paint Greece, I feel more architectural. I feel like, you know, I'm out there to build something. In addition to Greece, condos was anxious to visit other parts of Europe.

Especially those associated with artists he had come to revere as important mentors. High on the list was Exxon Provence. The town in southern France were the renowned artist Paul Cezanne that many years painting a single mountain. His beloved Monsovi Twa. Cezanne was a man that opened many doors. He was my mentor, and he would look at Monsovi Twa, you know, and work it over and over again. Now, here's the guy taking on a single object. He took on this mountain. When I got to Exxon Provence, the first thing I saw was the mountain. In fact, this was back in the 60s, and I saw this beautiful shape, and it was like a bare breast in the air. You know, just very pure looking form. And then I said, well, I'm going to do that mountain.

And I sat down for a few days there, and I began to sketch the mountain. I did quite a few drawings of Monsovi Twa in different angles. And then I decided to do paintings of Monsovi Twa. Cezanne made an impact on me that, again, here's a moment. Here's a guy that has taken on the art world, totally on his own. Whether you liked it or not, you couldn't change or sway him. Van Gogh had to say, you know, a lot of good painters are really, to me, soul painters. Getting into Exxon Provence, I had the opportunity to work in St. Anne's studio. That was a big highlight in my work, and my life actually drew from his still life. St. Anne was standing there working, and so was I. You know, believe this or not, I wanted to talk to him. And so I went to the cemetery,

and I found St. Anne, you know, I found the tomb and the whole thing. I looked around, I saw some flowers, and other people's graves. I just picked them, and I put them on his. I said, why not this chair? I felt very good at that moment that I worked in the studio a little bit. Here I am. I'm very close to him. He's not alive, but he's there. And I just said, thank you to him. Throughout his career, condos has maintained a staunch independence, painting the subjects that truly interest him, regardless of prevailing critical opinion. Thus he has felt free to claim as his own subjects like Mozambitua, that are veritable icons in art history. Maybe other people would say, if you do that for, you know, you worked against the master. Well, I did it because it was important to me to paint that mountain, and I did have a good show in the Bay Area. Alfred Frankenstein, you know,

on the Great Critics of our Area, he, the capital letters, you know, and the paper were the man who dared to challenge St. Anne. I loved it. And luckily, Frankenstein said it, he didn't try to work like St. Anne. He just painted the mountain. And I really enjoyed that write-up. Greg is a consummate professional in that he has always researched sources and really ranged over art history. He reads about, says on, he reads about Buddha, and he goes to the places that these artists have worked, all artists stand on the shoulders of other artists. And so Greg's working with these sources comes out of a real love, and a search for understanding of an artist like Cezanne or Hopper, or whoever he's looking at at the moment. While continuing his research in Europe,

condos also began to explore other landscape subjects in the United States. His travels eventually led him to Yosemite, and it was there, amid the towering granite monoliths of the High Sierra's that he encountered one of his greatest challenges. Every landscape, every area that you work in has a different challenge to it. For example, if you go to Yosemite, it's all vertical. And it knocked me over because I didn't think that there were rocks so tall, so vertical. It was probably one of the biggest challenges of my career to make it work. I failed at the beginning because I wasn't getting the true height of what these things are, and then I had to adjust to the height that is to push the objects in the foreground and make them look smaller, and then extend the height of the El Capitan, for example. Responding to the vertical splendor of Yosemite,

condos discovered not only a new set of artistic challenges, but also a vital connection with another group of landscape painters, the 19th century artists who first popularized Yosemite scenes. Those artists, including Albert Beerstadt, Thomas Hill, and William Keith, traveled widely throughout the Sierra's doing plenary painting that is painting directly from nature in the open air. Yosemite has been painted by many, many painters throughout the years, and I feel like I'm an extension of those great painters like Beerstadt and Thomas Hill and Keith, and the other good ones. So I feel like that they did their part and I'm doing mine. Gregory condos is continuing in a long line of American landscape painting that goes back to Thomas Cole to Thomas Hill, Beerstadt, William Keith. There certainly is, in my mind, a lot of similarity

between the way Gregory condos goes about painting in the way William Keith does. Gregory really works in the traditional 19th century landscape methods, which is to go out and do sketches as Keith did. Rough sketches in the plane air, as we call it, and then bring those back to the studio and use them as guides to create magnificent paintings. Thomas is working, Yosemite is not in the bombastic tradition of a Beerstadt. Greg brings, I think, a simplicity and an honesty. He's not, again, trying to imbue his paintings with grandiose meaning or use nature in the sense of symbols. He's simply looking at a landscape that he loves and trying to represent it and share it with the viewer. Gregory's landscapes are solid, well-made, honest, straightforward, direct.

He is what I would call a painterly realist. That is, he is as concerned with making a good painting as he is in necessarily representing reality, although, of course, he is a realist. A lot of people think of his work as being the work of a realist painter, and there certainly is a connection to that aspect. He blows out and he paints from life and he also goes out in the sketches and he studies. He also goes back to the studio and works out the painting and the primary concern is with the problems of painting. Problems of composition, problems of making appearance, statement as a painting is opposed to trying to duplicate that which is out there in nature. There are some pages that will work from nature and work very quickly, complete a painting in one sitting and Greg, I think, is more comfortable with going back thinking about working on fighting for an image, fighting for the final painting,

that's a painting that develops out of considerations and scrapings and repainings and sanding out their hard work. It works very hard at them. This workman-like approach to painting, this interest in constructing a landscape, according to underlying formal principles, is a defining characteristic of condos' work. It is, in a very real sense, the artistic compass that allows him to find his bearings in almost any landscape. If you have that sort of foremost enterprise, then it doesn't matter where you paint, when you paint, what subject matter you're after. Because you're interested in the kind of abstracting, not duplicating nature, but tempting to interpret it in some way. You look at his painting and you see, essentially, first of all, blob the paint. You interpret those as bushes, pieces of trees,

vineyard, roadways, and, actually, there are simply gestural applications of abstract units. So that those characteristics are what enables a drag, I think, to produce his luminous and sweeping kind of landscapes. Some of condos' most sweeping and luminous paintings are of the American Southwest. In Arizona and New Mexico, he found a landscape rich in monumental forms. But he was attracted by something more than just the formal qualities of the land. Sure, you see the monoliths, you know, of the rock forms and things like that. But I was actually looking for something more than just an object. I was looking for something maybe the spiritual part that happens in painting, and I did some reading and investigating about the native of American.

And how he, you know, he is so totally involved with the earth. And so I thought maybe this could also come into my painting somehow. I went to Abigail. This is where George O'Keefe settled. I spent about a week there and moved around and worked. But there are some rock formations in Abigail that are beautiful. And there's this flat top mountain that's just so different. If O'Keefe would settle in on that mountain, like Cezanne did, it would have been, I think, just as important of a mountain. I think you can draw a parallel between Gregory Condos and George O'Keefe. They're both loners. They've both gone their own direction. They haven't cared one wit about what the art world thinks they ought to be doing. Certainly, contemporary art scene would not have encouraged Condos to start landscape painting when he did. And George O'Keefe certainly didn't care about what they thought of her spending so much time in New Mexico and out of New York.

In addition to O'Keefe, Condos feels a strong connection with Maynard Dixon, another American artist who spent much time alone in the vast spaces of the Southwest. That's why I'm attracted to Maynard, just the idea that this man had that lone quality. I think a painter has to have that quality in him to feel alone because this is to me like a spiritual happening. You kind of feel like you're part of nature. Gregory has many mentors from the past, from past art. His vision is always fresh in his own, but these people are there as it were watching. They are there in his consciousness always. I think that this is true of any serious artist.

There is this kind of great dialogue or conversation with the past. As a painter, I think you learn to see the tradition of painting as one long continuum, starting actually with a cave period through all of the history of painting. And it's all part of the same piece. There are certainly emphasis in various kinds of styles and tendencies. But being a painter, one of the joys is feeling that you're hooked up to that tradition. Greg is quite willing to feel connected. I mean, he's desirous at feeling connected to those past painters. And I don't think that he's all uncomfortable working in a tradition that some people would might perceive as all fashion, but that he would consider a lineage. That is a very different thing than being all fashioned. The first paintings I remember seeing of Greg's were of the Southwest.

I think that was in about 1972. And I was taken with the wonderful sense of space in those paintings. He deals with a kind of crucible of landforms, of great masses, the sky, the land. And he gives a very solid, stable geometry to this, and yet always the little beautiful touches of color that appear at the edges of things. And what happens is, is like a battle of edges. You have to, I call it, the battle of edges, actually. When you lay color down side by side, and one color is naturally different than the other, you're creating an edge. His paintings are often appreciated for the creamy quality of the paint. But looking just a little bit beyond that characteristic, you can see these colors laid down in highlights or to define edges or shadows. And they'll always lay down just a tremendously sure stroke.

He has to be quite accurate so that when he's laying down that highlight of red or orange to define the edge of a blue, it's almost muscular. In the southwest, condos is able to enjoy the solitude that means so much to him. To spend time alone in nature with his work, this need for solitude also draws him to open areas along the Pacific coast, where he experiences a similar sense of freedom. When I'm away from people, I'm at ease. I like people. I love them. But I just personally don't care for crowds. And I'm very tranquil when I'm out there in that open space. He needs to get away from people. He needs that time, and it is so different from Greg in public. Because you would think he's the most rigorous, warm, which he is.

But he also has that quiet time. I have to get out there and just concentrate on how great it is to be alive. That to me is just so important because as you get older, and especially as a painter, you find you think you got it together. You know, you're doing good work, but then obviously you realize, where's the time, you know, how much time is there? Throughout the years, Gregory Condos has faced a variety of challenges in his art as well as in his personal life. But nothing prepared for the one he encountered in 1985, when Rosie, his wife of 32 years, died after a lengthy illness. When Rosie passed on, I felt like that's it.

That's the end of my career and life, really. I couldn't cope with it. I couldn't cope with my companion dying. So I gave up, I thought I gave up painting. And then my kids, you know, Valerie and Steve, they encouraged me or urged me to take a trip. They said, yeah, you've got to get out of here. You've got to get to go someplace and don't take anybody with you just going your own and work it out. Condos got in his car and drove slowly across the United States. Finally, when he reached the Atlantic coast, he felt something begin to shift. I woke up one morning and the light was bright. And the sun was out there. And I said to myself, I got to live. It's over.

You know, she's not coming back. And it made a world of difference. I just all of a sudden picked up my pastels and started working. It was a good feeling, a new feeling. In good times and in bad, over the years and across the many miles, Condos has remained connected to his roots. For him, all roads eventually lead back on back to the Sacramento Delta. I've got that travel it. I love to move around. I get back to this area and Sacramento has been home. It's familiar. I guess that's the important thing. It's so familiar. And I embrace it wholeheartedly. I think it's also important to acknowledge that Greg has been a very important factor in a community of artists in Sacramento. People who have influenced one another, who have shared ideas about the landscape.

People like Wayne Tebow, with whom he's shared a long friendship. I see affinities between the relatively white light of the Greg Sacramento river scenes and those white backgrounds that you see behind Wayne Tebow's cakes and pies. I think Greg has been very important in this larger community and it's really been an impetus for him as well. The active art scene in Sacramento was created by us. It wasn't others before us. And we even put a gallery together. The artists getting together was crucial. We helped criticize each other. And it was a kind of non-competitive, wonderful kind of camaraderie that we, I think, were blessed by and very much helped by. And I think it made an enormous difference. Greg and Wayne, as teachers have had,

have definitely influenced some of the possibilities showing the gallery scene. They've had an influence also on the way paintings. In fact, there are people that talk about a Sacramento school and that Sacramento school comes out from a number of painters and particularly from Condos and Tebow. One of his contributions has truly been the defining the landscape of California Central Valley. As I think back in time during the 19th century, although the Sacramento River and this area was depicted, it was generally depicted by artists who were traveling through this part of California. We see with Greg Condos and also other people that he has worked with in Sacramento, really coming to terms with a kind of landscape definition of this part of the West. Greg has been a teacher, one of the strongest

and most influential teachers in the Sacramento area for over 30 years. I think that being a teacher and being an artist is a very felicitous combination because it keeps you engaged in the act of thinking about art, thinking about the history of art. And I think it's just that kind of ongoing dialogue that you have as a teacher that keeps you energized as a painter and makes you want to go on and keep trying to improve your own work. The idea of just painting is not good enough. The idea of learning is more important and although I'm an accomplished painter, I'm learning. I haven't stopped learning and I hope I never will. Every day that goes by how we feel that I've learned something if I'm working in art. And that's a good feeling. Thank you.

Funding for Gregory Condus, a passion for the land has been provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by the following arts organizations and by these additional underwriters.