Artist Statement
“I work in layers. That is the deepest thing I can tell you about how I paint. Each canvas holds the layers beneath it — the metallic underpaint that catches light from within, the glaze that gives the surface its particular warmth, the paint strokes that carry the energy of the moment they were made. In different light, these layers reveal themselves differently. The painting you see at nine in the morning is not quite the painting you see at four in the afternoon. I have always believed that a painting should keep giving.”
Denise Regan paints vibrant still lives that are anything but still. Fearless color fills the canvas with interlocking patterns. Tipped tables, tumbling objects, and cascading flowers threaten to burst beyond the picture plane. As Helen Harrison wrote in the New York Times, Regan "packs her colorful canvases with stylized yet opulent shapes and patterns, crossing back and forth between still life and decoration for its own sake." Playful yet serious, generous in spirit, these paintings radiate what can only be called joie de paint.
Regan lives and works in Massachusetts, and has exhibited in galleries around the country as well as at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Cornell University and the University of Chicago, as well as in collections of David Rockefeller, Jr. Michael Caine, and Ralph Lauren.