Deeling C. Gregory’s art has moved through watercolor, acrylic, oil, ink, colored pencil, mixed media, public murals, and—since 2015—near-daily digital mixes. Across those forms, her own studio notes reveal a practice built on close observation, revision, vivid color, and room for the viewer’s imagination.
Observation, photographs, and preparatory drawings
Deeling often begins with something seen or remembered: a landscape, a plant, an animal, a family photograph, or a pencil study made years earlier. In her notes on Jamaican Children, she describes returning to a preparatory drawing based on a photograph and eventually painting more freely without making another study. Other works grew from photographs she took on walks and travels, including her Vision Mountain watercolors.
An iterative studio practice
The finished image is rarely the only version that matters. Deeling documented transitional stages of paintings such as The House That Chirp Built, noting how figures, architecture, color, and spatial relationships changed as she worked. She has written about adding and removing imagery, modulating color, simplifying rooms and landscapes, and stopping before too much revision erases the energy of an earlier stage.
That process helps explain the layered feeling in much of her work. Animals, plants, figures, calligraphic marks, aerial views, and architectural forms can occupy the same image. Deeling described Aqua Rider as an “all-over painting” whose imagery contributes to a theme while leaving the story open for each viewer.
Traditional materials and hand-built supports
Deeling’s original works span large-scale watercolor and acrylic paintings on paper, oil and acrylic on canvas, ink drawings, colored pencil, and mixed media. Her studio practice has also been distinctly hands-on. Writing about The Source—Giant Springs, she explained that she built the painting’s wooden stretcher bars herself with a hammer, hand saw, and staple gun.
Digital mixes
Beginning in 2015, digital mixing became a near-daily part of Deeling’s practice. The digital works continue concerns visible throughout her earlier art: intense color, rhythm, ambiguous space, animals and plants, remembered places, and unexpected combinations of imagery. They sit within the same long practice rather than replacing the watercolors, drawings, paintings, and murals that came before them.
From artwork to archival giclée print
The medium of an original artwork and the material of its reproduction are separate facts. Originals in Deeling’s catalog may have begun as paintings, drawings, mixed-media works, or digital compositions. The art prints sold by Art by Deeling are archival-grade giclée reproductions produced on acid-free Hahnemühle William Turner paper. They ship flat and unframed so the collector can choose the final presentation.
For handling, mounting, glazing, and display recommendations, read How to Frame and Care for Fine Art Prints. To learn more about the artist, visit About Deeling C. Gregory.
Sources from Deeling’s studio archive
- Sun latitudes, sonorous gems, Deeling’s project and studio journal
- The House That Chirp Built—work in progress
- Aqua Rider
- The Source—Giant Springs
- About Deeling C. Gregory