Greg Brehm was born and raised in northeastern Ohio, where the skies were as gray as the deteriorating industrial mid-west streetscapes. The early color in his world came from Sesame Street, Walt Disney, comic books, Saturday morning cartoons, advertisements and the spectacle of sporting events. His artistic inclinations were rooted in these artificially bright worlds, full of iconic images, bold lines, stylized logos and the occasional inclusion of catchy words and phrases. He never outgrew them.

Fifteen years in New York City brought additional influences. Amongst these were a love for the urban landscape, a feel for the energy of a city and its gathered people and an eye for finding beauty in common everyday objects. Manhattan also added to his attraction to all things iconic, stylized, and unabashedly commercial, with a sense of irony and an ever-present grin for things that are often taken too seriously.

Greg currently resides in Los Angeles, and works from his Venice studio. His art is based upon wide use of bright colors and adopted iconography. The colors are rarely natural to their subject matter. Faces might appear in combinations of red, orange and purple. Flowers might pop up in cerulean blue, watermelon pink and neon green. Nothing is as it should be. But it works. And it works beautifully.

His paintings and prints glow with bold flat strokes of color that meld into recognizable forms that float and/or hide amongst a matching camouflage background, creating a tense and dynamic surface that is at the same time entirely coherent and calming. You might think about the image. You might wonder about its context. You might think about the added words. But you are unlikely to question the attractiveness of the piece.

His sculptural works are similarly transformative. Greg takes familiar and mundane castings and carvings and covers them with the same bright colors and bold strokes. Because the colors simply don’t belong, they force you to see the original objects in an entirely new way. You might never notice that the manhole cover that you walk over every day can be breathtaking, until you see what Greg could do with it.

His photography is part of a large project, shooting neon signs all across the United States. By its very nature then, like his other works, it is bright, colorful and overtly commercial and iconic in nature. But the photographs rarely depict an entire sign. Rather, they focus on a letter, a phrase, a star, an arrow, faded paint, or broken bulbs, making you focus beyond the surface.

In each of Greg’s works, you are asked to see something differently. They allow you to think just a bit, without false pretense or an eye to condescension. The art can accomplish this because while the artist understands that an audience looks for something extra and special in its art, he never forgets that first and foremost, art should be both beautiful and accessible.