Greg Deda is a Toronto-based artist.
His dreams as a young artist were to study and explore drawings, paintings and art history from the Renaissance and Romanticism eras.
In 1996, Greg’s dream and passion became reality when he was accepted to the Scuola Dei Beni Culturali (now the University of Salento) in Italy. He was deeply inspired by frescos painted by the great Maestros of the early to late Renaissance period (Michelangelo, Botticelli and Mantegna). Contact with the art of the great maestros influenced and helped him to understand the form of the human figure, and later, to use this knowledge to create his compositions.
Greg’s instincts are to put all his knowledge grasped from Renaissance art into his modern paintings.
His next step brought him to Modern art. Greg explored the art of the Post Berlin Wall era attending Kunst Schule in Germany. There, he met many emerging and successful artists from the period. The new energy that these artists brought to modern art, especially Jörg Immendorff and Gerhard Richter became a big inspiration for Greg’s future work. Artists in the late nineties were open to critiquing and sharing each other’s art ideas and Greg feels fortunate to have been a part of that talented group. His style of art is mysterious and full of magic. This magic is produced combining realistic depiction and abstract dream feelings of philosophy, mythology, architecture and atmosphere.
Having spent some time as a set designer, Greg continually creates magic scenes that are designed to emotionally awaken the audience. Water, architecture, trains, bridges and trees that staged his mysterious scenes, are used to achieve his distinct atmosphere. Greg’s paintings are abstracts open to the audience to relate to and interpret using its own imagination and to be a part of this art spirit.
