"Archetypal images and their ability to communicate ideas that transcend religion and culture is the subject of my work. My watercolor drawings and oil paintings are rooted in Geometric Abstraction but reference non-Western traditions such as Byzantine mosaics, Tibetan Buddhist Mandalas, Indian Tantra Drawings and Navajo weavings. Recurrent themes are ritual, growth and the passage of time.

Each of my paintings starts from a central axis that divides the support into equal “golden” sections. Initially an inviolable ground of one or two colors is painted on the support. Using the points of the Fibonacci sequence, transparent forms and beads of color are applied in recurring accretions. The resulting patterns depict a gnomonic expansion, much like the symmetric growth of a tree or the shell of a nautilus.

Although precision is a predominant quality of my work, evidence of my hand renders each piece subtly asymmetrical. I embrace these natural variances, even as I seek the gestalt of the finished work. Every mark begets and relates to another mark, creating a visible record of time as the surface evolves and the past is seen with the present. Each of my paintings is offered as both an antidote to the distractions of our everyday world, and as an entrance to the collective unconscious."

 

Grace DeGennaro is fluent in the visual languages of oil, gouache and watercolor paints. Her technically proficient paintings on both canvas and paper are tranquil, minimal compositions based on traditional symbols and sacred geometry. DeGennaro’s rendering of cubes, diamonds, tongues, pyramids, fountains, rivers and the vesica piscis are meditative in process as well as in observation.  Fueled by conscious pattern, concentration on ritual and observance of the passage of time, DeGennaro’s paintings are as spiritual to the viewer as they are to the painter.  

DeGennaro earned her MFA at Columbia University.  Her work has been shown at Icon Contemporary Art, The New Art Center, The Portland Museum of Art, The Center for Maine Contemporary. Her work is included in the importantexhibition "To Infinity and Beyond: Mathematics in Contemporary Art," Heckscher Museum, Huntington, NY. Curated by Lynn Gamwell and Elizabeth Meryman.   Her work is included in numerous private collections.