The Figures
Stephen Westfall
December, 2012
The sport of ice-skating dropped the compulsory figure competition several years back, because it wasn’t athletic enough for television, but I remember being riveted while watching Michelle Kwan go through the figures; watching her eyes and the perfect control of her body as her skates evenly etched their patterns into the ice. It was as if she was a drawing tool for some invisible hand moving with divine deliberation to create lines that might be hard to see on ice, but which are etching themselves…View Full Essay
Regina Granne, Elegy: War Games
The Olson Gallery, Bethel University
Mar. 15th, 2009
Mixing art and politics is always risky. Art can easily become sentimental, bombastic, or downright preachy. But New York artist Regina Granne resists those traps in her War Games drawings. Her small-scale, delicate colored pencil and graphite works address the unpopular war in Iraq by picturing the literal and emotional distance through which we understand the war and its casualties. Granne achieves this detachment by depicting objects — maps, bar graphs, satellite photographs, children’s…View Full Essay
The Paintings and Drawings of Regina Granne
June 12th, 2007
We always may be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution." George Kubler, The Shape of Time. In her current exhibition Regina Granne examines the most intractable problem of all, organized human violence—war, in short—and devises works that demonstrate the variety of forms in which our culture has conditioned us to literally see its solution...View Full Essay
1995
I’ve always thought of Regina Granne as working in a northern European renaissance style, concerned with special articulation more than form-diffusing light. The dropping floor planes in her studio still lifes and model studies have reminded me of Brueghel and Van Eyck; the crisp geometries of her flower studies of Mondrian (himself, a carrier of the northern European tradition.)...View Full Essay
December, 1988
Regina Granne’s paintings have a dual nature in that they are both rigorously formal and powerfully spiritual. Neither the formal aspect nor the spiritual aspects lose their force because of the existence and presence of their counterpart. Rather, each aspect is dependent on its counterpart because it is its counterpart...View Full Essay