BIO


 My only surviving piece of childhood art is a small clay idol of a
coiled serpent with wings that I made when I was six years old.  I
remember busily creating all kinds of art projects as a child but
let go of those tendencies during my adolescent years. In my late
teens and early twenties I began to experience several deeply
disturbing and sublime transcendental states  that included,
among other things, sleep paralysis, astral projection, and
archetypal dreaming. These events urged me to turn back to art
as an exploratory tool that I could use to study and flesh out my
newly emerging world view. I began making drawings regularly
when I was twenty and a couple years down the road decided
that it was my mission in life and decided to enroll in college and
study art. Taking the leap from drawing to painting in 2006, I’ve
centered on painting as my primary medium since 2007. In 2008
I graduated with a BFA from the University of Texas and have
been participating in various group shows regularly since then.

  My paintings walk the line between the purely abstract and the
representational.  The imagery stems from my ability to use
concentration as a solvent that dismantles the outer significance
of objects and reimagines all the possibilities present in the
rudiments of their design. By inducing a kind of trance state that
fuses interior hypnagogic imagery to my waking observations, I
am able to see the static and isolated become fluid and open.
The dynamic between object, environment, and viewer becomes
scrambled. Detachment from the normal field of perception in
this manner allows me to identify all kinds of strange and alien
relationships in things that might otherwise seem mundane. The
resulting images born from this process usually have a mix of the
recognizable merging with the ambiguous or inexplicable.  The
ultimate goal behind this practice is to learn how to live life with
one foot on land on the other in the stream. I believe the key to
all innovation lies in the ability to incorporate a dialogue
between subconscious and self conscious factors, with the
imagination as a mediator. By using this approach in my art
making process I feel like I’ve found a method that is overtime
building a passage between my inner and outer life.

  Many influences weave their way into the themes I deal with
artistically. Ideas taken from Christianity, Gnosticism, Qabalah,
Alchemy, dream psychology, astronomy, quantum physics, and
science fiction , along with many other subjects, all color my  
growing understanding of the mechanics behind the veil of
ordinary perception and play some role in how I think about and
justify the imagery that I create.

I currently live and work in Austin, TX.
Gregory Pettit
b. 1980 in Plano,TX