About Deeling C. Gregory

Deeling C. Gregory is a Hawaii-born, Montana-based artist whose work ranges from large-scale public murals and traditional paintings to surreal digital compositions. Across many decades, she has worked in watercolor, acrylic, oil, ink, colored pencil, mixed media, and digital art. Animals, botanical forms, remembered places, saturated color, and ambiguous spaces recur throughout her work.

Artistic practice

Deeling’s art is eclectic by design. Her public work includes large murals featuring her “bubble-o” buffalos, while her studio catalog moves among landscapes, figures, horses, birds, plants, abstraction, and imagery that veers toward the surreal. Since 2015, she has also created near-daily digital mixes.

Her archived studio notes show an iterative process: she works from observation, photographs, preparatory drawings, and memory; records transitional stages; adjusts color and spatial relationships; and adds or removes imagery as a piece develops. Read the source-based overview How Deeling C. Gregory Creates Her Art.

Origins and education

Deeling grew up in Hawaii and later spent approximately thirty years in the San Francisco Bay Area before making her studio in Montana. She began as a mathematics major at Stanford University, but became committed to art after her sister encouraged her to take a figurative drawing class. She traveled in Europe, completed a Bachelor of Science at Stanford University, and pursued select postgraduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Her work draws on an enchanted childhood, years in the Bay Area, and the stark beauty of the rural ranch and farm country surrounding her Montana studio.

Public art

  • Great Falls Underpass Mural Project, designed by Deeling Gregory and Kelli Rochelle Lawson and completed in 2013
  • Rocky Mountain Building Mural Project, downtown Great Falls, Montana
  • Great Falls traffic boxes

Selected exhibitions

  • First Friday Art Walks, Great Falls, Montana, 2005–2019
  • Colors of Fall Exhibition, Great Falls, 2014
  • Great Falls Public Library, Great Falls, Montana, 2011–2012
  • Neighbors, Great Falls, Montana, 2000
  • Public Radio Offices, MSU Great Falls, Great Falls, Montana, 1999–2005
  • University of Great Falls, Montana, 1999
  • Main Gallery, Consolidated Edison International, Los Angeles, California, 1996

Selected press and archives

Follow Deeling’s current digital explorations on Facebook and Instagram.

Two poems by Deeling

A Poem

Sun latitudes, sonorous gems,
The light flickers, shadows dart,
Leafy imps and pungent fruit,
Dolorous blooms,
The tinkling of jade,
Teardrops rippling,
Crashing waves,
Still water,
Birdsong,
A child smiles

Poem 2

Lotus blossoms, one, two, three,
Greener than the greenest horns,
Flying ponies, pink and red,
Also flying, birds of prey,
Horses, riders on the shore,
Themselves a spectacle…