Greg Constantine: Artist, Author, Educator
Greg Constantine taught painting, drawing, and art history at Andrews University for forty-three years while conducting sixteen art history summer sessions for students in Europe. His exhibition record reveals that he began exhibiting nationally in 1969, and since 1975, he has had numerous one-man shows, including seventeen in New York City. He has written 11 books, each page featuring elaborate drawings. The focus of Constantine's professional career has clearly been creating and exhibiting his art in nine American cities and eight European countries
Artistic Career and Evolution
1972-1978:Television Images Constantine's painting involved squeezing paint tubes in horizontal strokes directly on the canvas to create large television images. He rendered popular personalities and famous artworks through this horizontal matrix, giving a curious effect to appropriate art works such as "La Grande Jatte" and "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" when distorted by the corresponding T.V. aberration. These works resembled pixelated or distorted versions of well-known paintings, mimicking the appearance of a malfunctioning television screen.
1978-1979: Jackson Pollock Works and American Landmarks Constantine continued using the tube squeezing technique for Jackson Pollock works and American Landmarks, but with curvilinear and random marks. These pieces featured swirling, chaotic patterns reminiscent of Pollock's drip paintings, applied to recognizable American landmarks, creating a unique blend of abstract expressionism and representational art.
1980-1981: Artist Licenses Constantine created authentic-looking license plates that appeared as if artists had designed their own personalized plates, complete with visual signatures. For example, these "Artist Licenses" were all white for George Segal, all black for Louise Nevelson, wrapped for Christo, splattered for Pollock, smashed for John Chamberlain, and melted for Dali. Each plate was a miniature representation of the artist's signature style.
1982-1986: Famous Artists visit American Cities His work dealt with drawings of famous artists visiting well-known American cities. Vincent van Gogh visits New York, Leonardo visits Los Angeles, and Picasso visits Chicago. These drawings were published as books by Alfred A. Knopf and Chicago Review Books. The illustrations featured whimsical scenes of historical artists interacting with modern cityscapes, filled with visual puns and references to both the artists' works and contemporary culture.
1986 Slices of Art Constantine worked on a series of constructed paintings he called "slices of art," featuring wedges of famous paintings including their attached cut frames. These works presented fragmented views of well-known artworks, often juxtaposed in unexpected ways, creating new compositions from familiar elements.
"Greatest hits" 1987: This series featured collage-like compositions made up of multiple "slices" from an artist's most famous works, creating a visual summary of their career.
Inside-out" paintings 1988: In these works, Constantine emphasized the frames more than the image area, inverting the traditional focus of a painting. The frames were manipulated to the interior, while the actual "painting" portion was moved to the exterior.
Combines 1989: These pieces featured split or combined portraits of famous artists, creating surreal, hybrid faces that referenced multiple artists or artworks simultaneously. "Messing With the Corpus Callosum” series combined halves of faces from different artworks, such as half of Botticelli's Venus with half of a face by Picasso. The resulting images were both familiar and jarring, challenging the viewer's perception.
Architectural combines 1999: These works integrated famous artworks with well- known buildings. For example, Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao appeared to be reflected in water, but the reflection was actually a distorted version of Picasso's "Guernica."
“Hairscapes" 2000: This series focused on sections of stylized hair from Renaissance paintings, abstracting and enlarging them to create landscape-like compositions.
"Tilted images" (2005-2006): These works distorted well-known masterpieces to create the illusion of them receding into space behind the frame, violating the traditional picture plane.
"Anamorphic Images" 2006-2008: An extension of the tilted images, these pieces stretched famous artworks so drastically that they could only be viewed correctly from an extreme angle, in close proximity to the canvas.
My Mountain In 2016, Constantine began creating landscapes inspired by a stratified red rock formation in Wyoming, marking a departure from his previous artistic focus. These works feature abstracted or stylized representations of geological formations, incorporating techniques from his earlier series to create unique interpretations of natural landscapes. Because this particular mountain did not have a name, Constantine was at first successful in naming it Mount Jackson Pollock. Pollock was born in Cody 15 miles away, but the local county council rescinded their prior approval.
Gesture Paintings 2022 Constantine suffered serious vision problems because of Macular degeneration. He resorted to creating a series of abstract paintings based on his arm gesture depositing an arc-like color stroke.
Painted Ceramic Sculptures. In 2023-2024 he began working in clay, creating ceramic vessels and painted ceramic sculptures of famous artists. Constantine's career demonstrates a consistent fascination with art history and the reinterpretation of famous art works, often using innovative techniques and visual innovations to challenge viewers' perceptions and create new dialogues with classic art.