Summer Water and Rocks Painting

Greg Dalton is a painter, draftsman, and printmaker whose work bridges Romanticism, Symbolist narrative, and natural history. Working primarily in oil on canvas and mixed media works on paper, he builds large-format compositions through layered staining, glazing, and atmospheric modeling. Fossil forms, relic landscapes, sacred figures, and eroded architectures appear not as fantasies, but as unearthed memory—fragments of worlds absorbed by time. Dalton studied painting, drawing, and printmaking in California under traditional instructors connected to classical draftsmanship and intaglio technique. His visual language draws from artists such as Böcklin, Klinger, Friedrich, Doré, and the color philosophies of Goethe and Humboldt. Rather than referencing them as style, he extends their lineage—treating landscape and the human form as metaphysical terrain shaped by memory and erosion. He has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Istanbul, Santa Fe, and the Bay Area, and spent much of his career working privately while developing a singular body of work. His paintings and drawings are not produced for volume but built over time—each piece operating as part of a larger cosmology rather than a series of isolated images. Dalton’s work exists outside trend and spectacle. It carries the weight of something excavated rather than invented: devotional, post-human, geologic, and mythic. As more contemporary painters move toward speed, reproduction, and surface novelty, his practice remains grounded in permanence, atmosphere, and the slow construction of worlds. His pieces are collected for their rarity, scale, and visionary continuity rather than for seasonal consumption. He lives and works in Arizona, where much of his current large-scale work is produced in seclusion, with an emphasis on legacy rather than market cycles.