Gregory Prestegord

Gregory Prestegord is an alumni of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Gregory’s work shows the beauty and the struggle of everyday urban life. He wanders the streets taking in what others shut out: old factories, abandoned train trestles, construction workers, the homeless. He tunes into the music of the city, the beauty and the grittiness of his surroundings, and recreates them in the visual rhythms of his paintings.

Prestegord’s technique and materials mirror his subject: using thick oil paint on found wooden boards, at times incorporating other media including coffee, newspaper and galkyd to create texture. Gregory says, “don't want to be perfect. I enjoy the final effect of the mistakes in my subject matter and my work. This process is my meditation, my way of finding truth in the midst of the chaos.”

From Broad Street Review--“Prestegord’s work is a type of Impressionism undreamt of by the Impressionists, who lived in an optimistic time and saw white Europeans as the paragons of civilization. Prestegord’s art is Impressionism infected by Expressionism, with its shriek of despair. It sees that something has gone wrong— that factories are shuttered or leveled to the ground, and that a ship that was once meant to represent America on the high seas is now a beached rust-bucket.

At least, all of this makes me despair. Prestegord isn’t necessarily a despairing artist, . . . He strikes me to as a gritty artist whose art celebrates his beaten-down-but-never-quite-out hometown and its inhabitants.” Andrew Mangravite