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Gregory Kondos

With his elegant compositions and intuitive, vibrant color palette, Sacramento native Gregory Kondos has earned a reputation as one of California’s foremost landscape painters. From his interpretations of the state’s endlessly varied coastline to his visions of Yosemite, where he has often been artist-in-residence, he has created remarkable images of the state’s multifaceted beauty.

Kondos describes his paintings as possessing a sense of quietude and cleanliness while maintaining a necessary lonely quality: “Less is more…and what is left out makes the picture more understandable.” His distilled images tend to feature a solitary element—a lone boat, a mountain peak, a house standing away from the others—that projects a contemplative sense of being alone in thought. His simple yet lively palette and elegant lines, influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning, Cezanne, and Gauguin, allow us to place ourselves within the space of the painting.

Biography

With his elegant compositions and intuitive, vibrant color palette, Sacramento native Gregory Kondos has earned a reputation as one of California’s foremost landscape painters. From his interpretations of the state’s endlessly varied coastline to his visions of Yosemite, where he has often been artist-in-residence, he has created remarkable images of the state’s multifaceted beauty. Born to Greek immigrant parents, Kondos has also painted extensively in his ancestral homeland and throughout Europe, as well as elsewhere in the U.S., particularly in the deserts near Santa Fe. Across his diverse subjects, the constant is a finely tuned sensitivity to the character of the land, and a singular ability to render scenes that reverberate in our imagination.

Kondos traveled around the world to paint, spending time in Greece and France, as well as significant time in the American Southwest, which inspired a number of mesmerizing desert landscapes. His first love, however, remained the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, whose particular varieties and qualities of blue were a running source of fascination throughout his career. (“A Touch of Blue” was the fitting title of his 2013 Crocker Museum retrospective.)

Kondos describes his paintings as possessing a sense of quietude and cleanliness while maintaining a necessary lonely quality: “Less is more…and what is left out makes the picture more understandable.” His distilled images tend to feature a solitary element—a lone boat, a mountain peak, a house standing away from the others—that projects a contemplative sense of being alone in thought. His simple yet lively palette and elegant lines, influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning, Cezanne, and Gauguin, allow us to place ourselves within the space of the painting. Chief curator and associate director at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, Scott A. Shields, who organized “A Touch of Blue: Landscapes by Gregory Kondos” at the museum in 2013, remarks: “His paintings simultaneously celebrate the terrain's inherent formal, abstract properties, as well as the beautiful possibilities of the paint itself."

Kondos’ lifelong achievements place him in the great tradition of American landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keefe. He has won numerous prizes and awards, including a lifetime achievement award from International Bienniale in Florence, Italy, and has been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York. Collections of Kondos’ work are displayed in museums around the world, including the Shanghai Art Museum in China, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The gallery at Sacramento City College, where he taught for nearly thirty years, bears his name, while the Crocker Art Museum recently published a monograph of his work.  


April 20, 2021
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church
Sacramento

Gregory Kondos painted in Greece, France, the American Southwest, and, especially, in California. Many of his paintings included signs of humanity’s presence, the land having been shaped and altered by development. This is true of his paintings of cultivated vineyards and fields, and especially of his scenes of Sacramento’s rivers and levee system.
In other works, Gregory presented nature at its most elemental, taking the eternity and wonder of places like Yosemite National Park and the Desert Southwest, as his theme. In all of his paintings, he celebrated the land’s inherent formal properties, along with the beauty and possibilities of paint itself. Though he moved between abstraction and representation, his commitment to landscape painting never wavered.
Gregory was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, to Greek immigrant parents. He moved to Sacramento when he was four. He was extremely proud of his Greek heritage and would have been very happy to have his celebration of his life here, at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church.

As a child, he helped supplement his family’s income by selling newspapers, working at a shoeshine stand, and as a shop clerk. At Sutter Junior High School, he won a Golden Key for art. At Sacramento High School, he was a member of their champion track team. When he was deciding upon his career path, he remembered his fear in telling his father that he wanted to be an artist. His father simply said, “Go for it.”

In 1941, Gregory began attending Sacramento Junior College and taking art classes, but his early training was interrupted when he enlisted in the Navy during World War II. He began his tour of duty in the Pacific on an aircraft carrier. During his down time, he drew sketches of crewmates, earning an unofficial position as the resident “ship’s artist,” which confirmed his desire to make art a career, and not just a hobby.

It was on his first of his many trips to Greece in 1963 that Gregory learned his palette of blues and whites. It was also there that he discovered the solid forms and simple geometries of boldly shadowed buildings bathed in sunlight. Prior to this, his paintings had been flatter and more Abstract Expressionist, but as he began to introduce shadows and three-dimensional weight, his paintings gained power and became the works we today recognize as quintessentially Kondos.

Before Gregory, landscapes of the Sacramento region were rare, as few artists before him thought the Central Valley offered enough interesting subjects for painting. Gregory proved his predecessors wrong. He said to me once, “I can stand in one spot and see five landscapes worth painting. Here, here, here, and here.” He found beauty in our region that most others overlooked. In so doing, he changed the way we see our home and, by extension, how we see ourselves.

When he went to Yosemite, Gregory had to learn to capture the immensity of the landscape. He did so by overemphasizing the scale to give viewers a sense of how the landscape felt, not just how it appeared. As one of Yosemite’s artists-in-residence, he was able to truly get to know his subject matter so he could portray it with understanding. “I am really led by the most important teacher out there,” he’d say, “and that’s nature.”

As much as for his art, Gregory was known equally for his bluster. You have all heard him say, “I’m a great painter!” And yet, this was not the sensitive man I came to know. He would also frequently state, “I am still a student. I am always learning.” I remember a specific encounter when he showed me a new painting. I said “Wow, that’s a really good one.” He looked me right in the eye and said with great sincerity, “I just want you to be proud of me.”

I remember fondly Gregory’s invitations to come down to his studio and see his most recent work. He would explain his process and talk about the place portrayed. As abstract as they were, it was always possible to tell if his paintings depicted California, France, or Greece. He understood how to distill the essence of a place.

Gregory loved painting so much that he managed to do it even when his body was giving up. After his cataract surgery he said, “I cried. I saw colors I had not seen in years.” His paintings had been growing progressively lighter as his vision grew darker, but after the surgery his colors once again became strong.

Later, when he was largely confined to a wheelchair, he had a pole installed in his studio so he could pull himself up to reach the top of his canvases, literally making art by sheer force of will. I was also there when he also told a room full of guests, “When Moni gets bored I can do a little pole dance for her.” Gregory was incredibly lucky to have Moni.

On one of my visits, Gregory showed me a tiny work on paper that he had done entirely in purple. It was a painting of an iris. He delightedly told me he had painted it with the sap of the iris itself, which dripped on his desk as the flower aged and died. He dipped his brush into what he called the iris’s “blood” and created something permanent with the loss.

Like this small painting of an iris, Gregory left us all with something permanent, his art, and it is that art which will survive long beyond any of us in this room. Generations from now, people will know Gregory through drawings and canvases. We, however, were fortunate to also have known the man himself.

“I’m a great painter!,” Gregory would say. To which I think we would all respond, “Yes, you were, and we are proud of you.”

- Scott Shields, Chief Curator & Associate Director of Crocker Museum, Sacramento, CA

(1923 - 2021)


Born

1923 Lynn, MA.



Education

1941 Sacramento Junior College, CA.

1946 Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, CA.

           MA, California State University, Sacramento, CA.


Selected Solo Exhibitions

2021  Tribute Exhibition, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, St. Helena, CA

2020 Celebrating 97 Years, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, St. Helena, CA

2018 Celebrating 95 Years, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

2015 Transcendent Landscapes, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

2013 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA.

2012 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

           4th Annual Small Works Show, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.

2010 World Expo, Ningbo Museum, Zhejiang, China.

           Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

2009 Historic Trading Posts of the West, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

2007 Arizona: A Millennium of Arizona Art, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

           From Mount Olympus to the Olympus Mountains, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

           University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

           University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA.

           Commissioned for a mural in Sacramento International Airport, Sacramento, CA.

2006 From Mount Olympus to the Olympus Mountains, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

           University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

           University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA.

           Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA.

1969 Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA.

1963 The Haggin Museum, Stockton, CA.

1962 E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA.

1958 Artist Cooperative/Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, CA.


Awards

2013 April 9th, Gregory Kondos Day Sacramento, Awarded Official Day of Celebration. Sacramento, CA.

2007 Golden Bear Artist of the Year Award, CA Arts Council, State of California.

2006 Prize Award, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

2005 High Honors Award, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

2003 Prize Award, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

2001 Those Who Bring Us Honor Award, Greek Orthodox Church, Sacramento, CA.

            Lenard Kester Award, 174th Annual Exhibition of the Academy of Design, New York, NY.

1999 Lifetime Achievement Award, International Biennial, Florence, Tuscany, Italy.

            Distinguished Alumni Award, Sacramento City College, Sacramento, CA.

1998 National CINE Award for art on video, Washington, D.C.

1997 Certificate of Merit Award, 172nd Annual Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

1996 Master of Drawing Award, American Artists Magazine, Learning from Today’s Art Masters, New York, NY.

1995 Elected National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

1994 Distinguished Service Award, California State University Sacramento, CA.

1990 Artist in residence, Yosemite National Park.

1966 Dilard Collection Purchase Prize, Art on Paper Exhibition, Selected by Thomas B. Hess, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hilll, NC.

1963 Awarded for painting Sea Breeze, 4th Winter Invitational, California Palace of the Legion of Honors, San Francisco, CA.


Selected Museum and Public Collections

SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA • Ningbo Museum, Zhejiang, China • Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC • Shanghai Art Museum, China • Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, China • Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA • Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ • Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ • Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA • Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC • Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA • Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA

Press

PRESS

Selected Artworks

Sacrament River Banks, 1989

Sacrament River Banks, 1989

Water Color on Paper

5 x 7 inches

210734

Red Rose, 2010

Red Rose, 2010

Oil on Canvas

13 x 10 inches

210733

Omaha Beach, 2007

Omaha Beach, 2007

Oil on Canvas

13 x 16 inches

210732

Iris, 2010

Iris, 2010

Oil on Canvas

20 x 10 inches

210731

Hilltop Chapel, 1996

Hilltop Chapel, 1996

Water Color on Paper

10 x 6 inches

210730

Hill Top Homes, 1996

Hill Top Homes, 1996

Pastel on Paper

9 x 7 inches

210729

Greek Boat, 2002

Greek Boat, 2002

Pastel on Paper

4.5 x 7 inches

200337

High Country, 2020

High Country, 2020

Oil on Canvas

36 x 48 inches

200288

Lily Fields, 2017

Lily Fields, 2017

Oil on Canvas

18 x 22 inches

190447

Sierra Snow, 1968

Sierra Snow, 1968

Pastel on Paper

6.5 x 8 inches

190446

Taos Pueblo, 2018

Taos Pueblo, 2018

Oil on Canvas

10 x 6.5 inches

190445

Sun Rise Range, 2019

Sun Rise Range, 2019

Oil on Canvas

36 x 48 inches

190329

Half Dome, Yosemite, 2018

Half Dome, Yosemite, 2018

Oil on Canvas

20.5 x 16 inches

190096

Mt. Pedernal, 2018

Mt. Pedernal, 2018

Oil on Canvas

17.5 x 23.5 inches

180518

Morada, Abiquiu, NM, 2017

Morada, Abiquiu, NM, 2017

Oil on Canvas

20 x 16 inches

180110

Noray’s Home, AZ, 2017

Noray’s Home, AZ, 2017

Oil on Canvas

8 x 10 inches

180109

Cathedral, 2016

Cathedral, 2016

Oil on Canvas

18 x 15 inches

170037

Mt. St. Victoire, 2015

Mt. St. Victoire, 2015

Oil on Canvas

20 x 17.5 inches

160287

Canyon de Chelly, 2015

Canyon de Chelly, 2015

Oil on Canvas

18 x 14 inches

160126

(1923 - 2021)


Born

1923 Lynn, MA.



Education

1941 Sacramento Junior College, CA.

1946 Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, CA.

           MA, California State University, Sacramento, CA.


Selected Solo Exhibitions

2021  Tribute Exhibition, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, St. Helena, CA

2020 Celebrating 97 Years, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, St. Helena, CA

2018 Celebrating 95 Years, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

2015 Transcendent Landscapes, Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

2013 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA.

2012 Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

           4th Annual Small Works Show, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.

2010 World Expo, Ningbo Museum, Zhejiang, China.

           Caldwell Snyder Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

2009 Historic Trading Posts of the West, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

2007 Arizona: A Millennium of Arizona Art, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

           From Mount Olympus to the Olympus Mountains, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

           University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

           University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA.

           Commissioned for a mural in Sacramento International Airport, Sacramento, CA.

2006 From Mount Olympus to the Olympus Mountains, Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ.

           University of Washington, Seattle, WA.

           University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA.

           Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA.

1969 Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA.

1963 The Haggin Museum, Stockton, CA.

1962 E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento, CA.

1958 Artist Cooperative/Contemporary Gallery, Sacramento, CA.


Awards

2013 April 9th, Gregory Kondos Day Sacramento, Awarded Official Day of Celebration. Sacramento, CA.

2007 Golden Bear Artist of the Year Award, CA Arts Council, State of California.

2006 Prize Award, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

2005 High Honors Award, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

2003 Prize Award, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

2001 Those Who Bring Us Honor Award, Greek Orthodox Church, Sacramento, CA.

            Lenard Kester Award, 174th Annual Exhibition of the Academy of Design, New York, NY.

1999 Lifetime Achievement Award, International Biennial, Florence, Tuscany, Italy.

            Distinguished Alumni Award, Sacramento City College, Sacramento, CA.

1998 National CINE Award for art on video, Washington, D.C.

1997 Certificate of Merit Award, 172nd Annual Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

1996 Master of Drawing Award, American Artists Magazine, Learning from Today’s Art Masters, New York, NY.

1995 Elected National Academy of Design, New York, NY.

1994 Distinguished Service Award, California State University Sacramento, CA.

1990 Artist in residence, Yosemite National Park.

1966 Dilard Collection Purchase Prize, Art on Paper Exhibition, Selected by Thomas B. Hess, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hilll, NC.

1963 Awarded for painting Sea Breeze, 4th Winter Invitational, California Palace of the Legion of Honors, San Francisco, CA.


Selected Museum and Public Collections

SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA • Ningbo Museum, Zhejiang, China • Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC • Shanghai Art Museum, China • Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, China • Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA • Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ • Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ • Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA • Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC • Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA • Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA

With his elegant compositions and intuitive, vibrant color palette, Sacramento native Gregory Kondos has earned a reputation as one of California’s foremost landscape painters. From his interpretations of the state’s endlessly varied coastline to his visions of Yosemite, where he has often been artist-in-residence, he has created remarkable images of the state’s multifaceted beauty. Born to Greek immigrant parents, Kondos has also painted extensively in his ancestral homeland and throughout Europe, as well as elsewhere in the U.S., particularly in the deserts near Santa Fe. Across his diverse subjects, the constant is a finely tuned sensitivity to the character of the land, and a singular ability to render scenes that reverberate in our imagination.

Kondos traveled around the world to paint, spending time in Greece and France, as well as significant time in the American Southwest, which inspired a number of mesmerizing desert landscapes. His first love, however, remained the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, whose particular varieties and qualities of blue were a running source of fascination throughout his career. (“A Touch of Blue” was the fitting title of his 2013 Crocker Museum retrospective.)

Kondos describes his paintings as possessing a sense of quietude and cleanliness while maintaining a necessary lonely quality: “Less is more…and what is left out makes the picture more understandable.” His distilled images tend to feature a solitary element—a lone boat, a mountain peak, a house standing away from the others—that projects a contemplative sense of being alone in thought. His simple yet lively palette and elegant lines, influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning, Cezanne, and Gauguin, allow us to place ourselves within the space of the painting. Chief curator and associate director at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, Scott A. Shields, who organized “A Touch of Blue: Landscapes by Gregory Kondos” at the museum in 2013, remarks: “His paintings simultaneously celebrate the terrain's inherent formal, abstract properties, as well as the beautiful possibilities of the paint itself."

Kondos’ lifelong achievements place him in the great tradition of American landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keefe. He has won numerous prizes and awards, including a lifetime achievement award from International Bienniale in Florence, Italy, and has been elected to the National Academy of Design in New York. Collections of Kondos’ work are displayed in museums around the world, including the Shanghai Art Museum in China, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The gallery at Sacramento City College, where he taught for nearly thirty years, bears his name, while the Crocker Art Museum recently published a monograph of his work.  


April 20, 2021
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church
Sacramento

Gregory Kondos painted in Greece, France, the American Southwest, and, especially, in California. Many of his paintings included signs of humanity’s presence, the land having been shaped and altered by development. This is true of his paintings of cultivated vineyards and fields, and especially of his scenes of Sacramento’s rivers and levee system.
In other works, Gregory presented nature at its most elemental, taking the eternity and wonder of places like Yosemite National Park and the Desert Southwest, as his theme. In all of his paintings, he celebrated the land’s inherent formal properties, along with the beauty and possibilities of paint itself. Though he moved between abstraction and representation, his commitment to landscape painting never wavered.
Gregory was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, to Greek immigrant parents. He moved to Sacramento when he was four. He was extremely proud of his Greek heritage and would have been very happy to have his celebration of his life here, at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church.

As a child, he helped supplement his family’s income by selling newspapers, working at a shoeshine stand, and as a shop clerk. At Sutter Junior High School, he won a Golden Key for art. At Sacramento High School, he was a member of their champion track team. When he was deciding upon his career path, he remembered his fear in telling his father that he wanted to be an artist. His father simply said, “Go for it.”

In 1941, Gregory began attending Sacramento Junior College and taking art classes, but his early training was interrupted when he enlisted in the Navy during World War II. He began his tour of duty in the Pacific on an aircraft carrier. During his down time, he drew sketches of crewmates, earning an unofficial position as the resident “ship’s artist,” which confirmed his desire to make art a career, and not just a hobby.

It was on his first of his many trips to Greece in 1963 that Gregory learned his palette of blues and whites. It was also there that he discovered the solid forms and simple geometries of boldly shadowed buildings bathed in sunlight. Prior to this, his paintings had been flatter and more Abstract Expressionist, but as he began to introduce shadows and three-dimensional weight, his paintings gained power and became the works we today recognize as quintessentially Kondos.

Before Gregory, landscapes of the Sacramento region were rare, as few artists before him thought the Central Valley offered enough interesting subjects for painting. Gregory proved his predecessors wrong. He said to me once, “I can stand in one spot and see five landscapes worth painting. Here, here, here, and here.” He found beauty in our region that most others overlooked. In so doing, he changed the way we see our home and, by extension, how we see ourselves.

When he went to Yosemite, Gregory had to learn to capture the immensity of the landscape. He did so by overemphasizing the scale to give viewers a sense of how the landscape felt, not just how it appeared. As one of Yosemite’s artists-in-residence, he was able to truly get to know his subject matter so he could portray it with understanding. “I am really led by the most important teacher out there,” he’d say, “and that’s nature.”

As much as for his art, Gregory was known equally for his bluster. You have all heard him say, “I’m a great painter!” And yet, this was not the sensitive man I came to know. He would also frequently state, “I am still a student. I am always learning.” I remember a specific encounter when he showed me a new painting. I said “Wow, that’s a really good one.” He looked me right in the eye and said with great sincerity, “I just want you to be proud of me.”

I remember fondly Gregory’s invitations to come down to his studio and see his most recent work. He would explain his process and talk about the place portrayed. As abstract as they were, it was always possible to tell if his paintings depicted California, France, or Greece. He understood how to distill the essence of a place.

Gregory loved painting so much that he managed to do it even when his body was giving up. After his cataract surgery he said, “I cried. I saw colors I had not seen in years.” His paintings had been growing progressively lighter as his vision grew darker, but after the surgery his colors once again became strong.

Later, when he was largely confined to a wheelchair, he had a pole installed in his studio so he could pull himself up to reach the top of his canvases, literally making art by sheer force of will. I was also there when he also told a room full of guests, “When Moni gets bored I can do a little pole dance for her.” Gregory was incredibly lucky to have Moni.

On one of my visits, Gregory showed me a tiny work on paper that he had done entirely in purple. It was a painting of an iris. He delightedly told me he had painted it with the sap of the iris itself, which dripped on his desk as the flower aged and died. He dipped his brush into what he called the iris’s “blood” and created something permanent with the loss.

Like this small painting of an iris, Gregory left us all with something permanent, his art, and it is that art which will survive long beyond any of us in this room. Generations from now, people will know Gregory through drawings and canvases. We, however, were fortunate to also have known the man himself.

“I’m a great painter!,” Gregory would say. To which I think we would all respond, “Yes, you were, and we are proud of you.”

- Scott Shields, Chief Curator & Associate Director of Crocker Museum, Sacramento, CA

Gregory Kondos
Biography

Press

Voluntary Simplicity

Art & Antiques

April 2021

Link

Gregory Kondos dies at 97. His landscapes, accentuated in blues, made Sacramento artist iconic

The Sacramento Bee

March 27, 2021

Memorial Remarks

Scott Shields, Chief Curator & Associate Director of Crocker Museum, Sacramento, CA

April 20, 2021

Link

Gregory Kondos discusses his storied career in art: World-renowned Sacramento artist continues to produce high-quality art

Valley Community Newspaper

November 25, 2019

Artist Gregory Kondos was raised in East Sacramento He was inspired to seek career as a painter during WWII

Valley Community Newspaper

October 17, 2019

Collector's Focus: Painting the National Parks

Western Art Collector

2017

Link

Gregory Kondos' 93-Plus Years of Blue Subtlety

The State Hornet, California State University, Sacramento

November 10, 2016

Gregory Kondos, LeVar Burton among first honored in Sacramento’s "Walk of Stars"

The Sacramento Bee

May 9, 2016

Sacramento City College celebrates a rich legacy of art

The Sacramento Bee

August 25, 2016

Art legend Gregory Kondos happily paints the blues

Sacremento State News

 August 31, 2016

Kondos has Always had the Oil Paniting Blues

SF Chronicle

July 9, 2015

Link

Sutter's Gold: Sacramento Airport Commission

City of Sacramento

2015

True Blue by Marc Weidenbaum

Sactown Magazine

February / March, 2013

Link

"Nature Was My Teacher" by Scott A. Shields

PleinAir Magazine

February / March, 2013

Link

The Crocker Mounts a Retrospective Show of Gregory Kondos' Work

The Sacramento Bee

March, 2013

Link

A Touch of Blue by Dana Joseph

Cowboys & Indians

February / March, 2013

Link

Paint it Blue: On the eve of his 90th birthday, Gregory Kondos discusses a lifetime of landscapes, his love for Sacramento and why he's big
in China

News Review

March 21, 2013

Kondos: Prolific and Energetic at 87, One of Sacramento's Favortie Artists Embarks on a Major Airport Project

The Sacramento Bee

August 29, 2010

Link

Wayne Thiebaud, Gregory Kondos and Fred Dalkey

The Sacramento Bee

March 22, 2009

Link

Gregory Kondos by Jillian O'Brien

Artworks

Fall 2005

Link

With his elegant compositions and intuitive, vibrant color palette, Sacramento native Gregory Kondos has earned a reputation as one of California’s foremost landscape painters. From his interpretations of the state’s endlessly varied coastline to his visions of Yosemite, where he has often been artist-in-residence, he has created remarkable images of the state’s multifaceted beauty.

Kondos describes his paintings as possessing a sense of quietude and cleanliness while maintaining a necessary lonely quality: “Less is more…and what is left out makes the picture more understandable.” His distilled images tend to feature a solitary element—a lone boat, a mountain peak, a house standing away from the others—that projects a contemplative sense of being alone in thought. His simple yet lively palette and elegant lines, influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning, Cezanne, and Gauguin, allow us to place ourselves within the space of the painting.

Gregory Kondos

Gregory Kondos, who was born in 1923 and passed away in March of this year shortly before his 98th birthday, was recognized as a virtuosic landscape painter not only in his hometown of Sacramento, but around the world. Influenced by Impressionist masters like Cézanne and Gaugin, he dedicated his life to capturing the natural world in luminous, sweeping paintings that, in the words of Crocker Art Museum chief curator Scott Shields, “celebrate the terrain’s inherent formal, abstract properties, as well as the beautiful possibilities of the paint itself.” Kondos’s close friend, fellow Sacramento artist Wayne Thiebaud, called Kondos’s intuitive, unfettered technique “a kind of brush dancing.”

With his elegant compositions and intuitive, vibrant color palette, Sacramento native Gregory Kondos has earned a reputation as one of California’s foremost landscape painters. From his interpretations of the state’s endlessly varied coastline to his visions of Yosemite, where he has often been artist-in-residence, he has created remarkable images of the state’s multifaceted beauty.

Kondos describes his paintings as possessing a sense of quietude and cleanliness while maintaining a necessary lonely quality: “Less is more…and what is left out makes the picture more understandable.” His distilled images tend to feature a solitary element—a lone boat, a mountain peak, a house standing away from the others—that projects a contemplative sense of being alone in thought. His simple yet lively palette and elegant lines, influenced by artists like Willem de Kooning, Cezanne, and Gauguin, allow us to place ourselves within the space of the painting.

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