A Conversation with Artist Greg Chann

How did your journey as an artist begin?

I’ve always, since childhood, liked to make things. I liked working with my hands; I was very visual, so I think that’s where my destiny began. I wasn’t a very good academic student in grade school, but I always excelled in my art classes. My mom really nurtured that.

I went on to excel in art through high school and college. I majored in sculpture, and that was a really prolific time. Then I went to graduate school and continued my practice. Pretty much for as long as I can remember, I’ve always liked visual arts.

What recurring themes or ideas do you explore in your work?

Back in college, that was my real awakening for art education. There were art history classes that I took that were good foundations in my understanding of composition. I learned how numerous different artists composed pictures. This taught me the formal properties of how to keep the viewer's eye on the page. The recurring theme that I have is to always keep the viewer engaged.

My works always involve a visual travel throughout them, making all of these different connections. They’re somewhat circular, and they’re like journeys. I like to equate it to a Yin and Yang symbol, where there are these opposing forces but also a continuation. That’s not only the recurring theme, but it’s my objective. I always try to keep the viewer’s eyes on the object. For all of my pieces, I am trying to make those connections from one area to the next, whether it’s through form, color, or both. It’s a very formal principle of art.

Once you have an idea, how do you go about turning it into a final piece?
I don’t do drawings for my pieces, so I work very directly. My ideas happen as I’m making the piece. I play around with the shapes on my table with a gridded mat and compose as I go. The planning is the execution, directly.

On my work table, I have all these different shapes: rectangles, squares, blocks, and more linear, thin pieces. I like to refer to that as my palette of shapes, just like a painter would have a palette of colors.
It’s really a two-stage process. The first stage is building the piece itself. I’ll take all those different acrylic shapes and start playing with them, making a composition. In my recent works, they are very geometric—rectangular—and then I’ll throw some curves into it. Then I glue them together. There’s depth to it, with layering and overlapping. I try to stop a little bit before I think I have a complete composition, because that’s when I want to use color—not as a second thought, but as a continuation of the composition. Painting is a whole different process with a whole different set of tools. They’re all airbrushed with ink, which is how I control the density and luminosity of the color.

I know I’m finished when it feels balanced, my eye moves around like I want it to, and the color combinations are doing what I want them to do. It just feels right, based on my own intuition.

How has your style evolved over time?

My work evolves through material use. I’ve worked with vellum, wood, and right now I’m using acrylic plastic and wire. So, I’ll play around with different materials, and quite often I’ll make a switch when I get too comfortable with what I’m doing. As uncomfortable as it is, I like to get out of my comfort zone. At some point, my process feels automatic, and when that happens it gets kind of boring—at least for me—so then I want to change it up.

The acrylic works started out as just acrylic, and then I thought I’d add the wire to make those connections. Then I illuminated the wire and started using color a lot more fluidly—adding brighter colors and making connections through that.

What is one of your favorite pieces that you’ve made?
When I was in college, I was making some really large pieces, and I was discovering new techniques, new materials, and new processes. The world was my oyster back then, and I wasn’t thinking about selling—I was just thinking about art and forms. I was a lot more daring back then, so there were pieces that I made that were pretty cool.

Moving forward, my favorite piece is usually the last piece that I make. I’m always building off of my previous works. I have a quote on my wall from Jasper Johns that says, “Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it, repeat,”and that’s how I work. Once I build a piece and see what I’ve done, I think about how I could learn from it and add to it in the next piece.