Greg Latch
About what the image can say.
Greg Latch did not come to painting through galleries or art school. He came through life. He drew portraits in Jackson Square in New Orleans, played in bands, and has never really stopped drawing or painting, even when nobody was looking.
For many years he worked as a psychiatric nurse in Tampa, in the jails and the psychiatric hospital. He cared for people across the whole range of the human mind, from the people most of us would call normal to the most severe illness, and some who had done terrible things. You cannot spend that long around that many minds and walk away seeing people the same way.
That is what you see in the work. His faces and figures are not just likenesses. They are stories about how complex the mind is and how many personalities can live in one person. Thirteen years at Artist Unlimited, painting beside master degree artists and learning directly from master painter Ray Paul, gave him the craft to tell them.
His technique layers oils, markers, and various knives into surfaces that are almost sculptural. It is not portraiture, even when faces appear. It is not abstraction, even when forms dissolve. It is something in between that makes the viewer work, and rewards that work with meaning.
His technique layers oils, markers, and various knives, building surfaces that are textured and almost sculptural. The work provokes intellectual engagement, inviting viewers to contemplate the complexities of his narratives. His spontaneous drawings reflect a release of shapes, energy, and emotion that formal training alone cannot produce.
What Latch brings to the canvas is not a style. It is a life. Mississippi, New Orleans, Atlanta, years in bands, years in Tampa's psychiatric wards, thirteen years painting with masters. Every kind of mind he met along the way is somewhere in the work, and that is what makes it impossible to categorize and impossible to ignore.
Mixed media on canvas and board.
