Eye (L'occhio) Painting

American by birth, Italian by citizenship, Nordic by vocation, Tuscan by figurative experience, Gregory Blanche is a reserved painter with rare public appearances who, despite his young professional age, achieves a highly expressive quality. He began in his early twenties in an exhibition in Caprese Michelangelo and has often participated in group shows in Florence, where he lives and works. Trained at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts, he has received recognition, and even a critics’ prize in Bolgheri in 1996. But these appreciable credentials do not suffice to express the coherence of his pictorial discourse, sustained by a technical skill of high quality. Gregory expresses himself in a variety of themes, but remains firm in style. At home in the company of established Tuscan artists of the likes of Riccardo Saldarelli, Walter Falconi and especially the magic Sergio Nardoni, Blanche has acquired valuable trade secrets while preserving intact his own inclinations which nevertheless vary from the figure, in his paintings both realistic and theatrical, to landscapes, robust and sober, well-built and poetically both exacting and evocative, and finally to still lives. These are perhaps the highest point in his painting, embellished with radiance (Caravaggesque), and revealing lens-like perfection. They are detached, yet positively enchanting with an intimate Nordic atmosphere echoing in the nuances of light (his reverence to Jan Vermeer). Pier Francesco Listri