I’m happy to announce that I’m curating an exhibition for my long time friend Gregg Stone at Eastern Projects in Chinatown. I’ve always been a fan of his art since we started showing his work at my gallery Crewest back in the early 2000’s. He’ll be showing a great body of his incredible work juxtaposed with some of the best prison art you’ve ever seen (which he collects heavily) and will be making it available as well. Below is my curator statement and all the details for the exhibition. I hope you can make it out to his show!

Gregg Stone (b.1952) is a contemporary realist painter based in Southern California and has been painting scenes of Mexican border life for almost three decades. He has exhibited extensively on both sides of the border from California to Texas, Mexicali to Tijuana.

Velvet Dragons highlights Stone’s rich color palette and strong compositions as indicators for the love he has for Mexican people. His subject matter illustrates that love and the excitement he’s searching for with a dash of the danger that he seaks. He captures snapshots of real life at the Mexican border and the soul of the people almost like a documentarian who understands these are all fleeting moments never to be seen again. In several paintings, like “Hotel Zamora”, he beautifully captures the mood and the deterioration of an old hotel, giving the building an almost undeserving yet beautifully nostalgic feeling. Stone is a master in his use of watercolor, gauche and ink. When artists use these wet mediums, rarely do you encounter such rich color with such great precision in line quality but somehow he pulls it off.

The true grit and rawness of his work lies in his realistic approach to his subjects which are mostly women in his paintings. Stone states that many of these women were junkies or women of “ill repute”, but he gives them class and offers them dignity by framing them where they are, in their real lived surroundings not posing them on chairs at some artist’s studio. This is best described in the work titled “Marta on Calle Jon II” where it’s not immediately obvious wether he knows this woman or not, and if he does maybe it’s very intimately? He paints her as if she’s numb, with very little emotion on her face. She’s in the middle of a very busy street in Tijuana, you can almost hear the car horns and the murmur of life on the streets around her. Stone’s paintings are sometimes broken up into two or three very distinct frames or scenes giving the viewer a peak into his state of mind. One such painting is “Stairway to Heaven” in which the artist releases his own inner battles with addiction and mental health by visually describing the beauty he sees in the often dark places he finds himself in. This theme guides you from painting to painting, seducing you with color then hitting you with reality. This leads us to the second half of the exhibition, his prison art collection.

Stone’s love for this forbidden art form started as he was living a certain lifestyle that unfortunately landed him in jail on multiple occasions. Locked up with mostly gangster Latino males, he became enamored with the black and grey tattoo ink work that many of these inmates had etched onto their bodies. Coincidently, the subject matter of Chicano culture and their views of women, drugs and crime seemed to instantly hit a chord with Stone. When he was finally out, he would look online for pen and ink work from inmates that he could purchase and quickly discovered that not only was it available but fairly affordable for him at the time. Stone describes the prison work as some of the most incredible art he’s ever seen. How an artist could use a simple Bic point pen and create shading effects that looked like they were airbrushed onto the surface. Some of these prison artworks on display, like Oscar Campo’s “Orgulloso”, are intricate pen and ink drawings illustrated on multiple sheets of paper and then carefully constructed. Stone has collected some of the very best Chicano prison art pieces available and they compliment each other very well. The pure color of Stone’s work sandwiched between black and white masterpieces somehow emphasizes the never ending search for that next euphoria.

This exhibition gives us an alternative view to love and joy and where it can be found. As the viewer, we are challenged to think of our own demons and angels, our struggles and addictions and even the gift of personal freedom, but most of all where we find the beauty of it all. - Man One, curator.

Some of Gregg’s work that will be on display…