McGregor’s art on display at Unison Bank for May

Tom McGregor is the artist of the month at Unison Bank. As a Jamestown native, one of McGregor’s earliest memories is drawing on a chalkboard given to him by his mother.

For the past 25 years, McGregor has pursued a career as a graphic designer. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s that he opened a design studio in St. Paul, Minn., and he met his wife, Jerri Jo Brandt, who helped him paint again.

When he discovered plein air painting it combined his passion for being outdoors with his love of painting. These days McGregor still designs but is working toward being a full-time painter.

He paints with a prismatic color palette, a theory with roots in late 19th century French art. The prismatic palette consists of intense, clean colors. McGregor learned it from Joe Paquet, who studied under John Phillip Osborne at the Ridgewood Institute. Osborne learned it from Arthur Maynard, who was trained by the renowned Frank Vincent Dumond of the Art Students League of New York.

With each painting McGregor strives to hone his proficiency so that he can better articulate his artistic vision. Properly applying highlights to a field of grass, for example, can almost make a person feel the warmth of the day emanating from the painting.

Water surfaces are a favorite of McGregor’s because distorted reflections afford the opportunity to paint like an abstract expressionist within the context of realistic painting, he said. The beauty of our natural world — the woods, the streams, the structures placed upon it — makes his heart beat faster, he said.

Tags: diversions, arts