Max Gregory

Creative pursuits often result in a sense of connection. Sometimes this connection is found between a performer and their audience or between a painter and their emotion. Still, more often than not, this pursuit leads us to something within—a connection between our environment, experience, and self-expression. 

Max Gregory’s creations express this sense of connection between environment and experience. With a particular love for pen and ink, but also working in acrylic, watercolor, digital, and other media, Max’s work seeks to understand psychology through the lens of narratives and myths that set a framework for inner workings, habits, drives, and fears.

Born in North Seattle, Max’s family strongly encouraged creativity in any form. Max taught himself to draw by copying his grandmother’s collection of illustration books, and his imagination was swept away by N.C. Wyeth and the illustrators of Tolkien.

Though quiet and reserved throughout his childhood and teenage years, Max found he could express himself through drawing. “I am still much better with a pencil than I am with words,” he explains. Max would continue his creative journey at Western Washington University, where he studied studio art.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Max’s drawings evoke the natural beauty of the environment and its influence on those who live there. Taking natural imagery found throughout the Northwest and stretching it across a vivid psychological and psychedelic landscape, Max wraps the routine in hues of magical realism. Alpine landscapes coexist with vibrant psychedelic gradients in the distance, hop flowers are personified and distorted, and tangled trees are sketched in a maze of careful detail.

There is more that lies beyond this environmental beauty, however. Adding another layer of complexity to his work, we can see what Max describes as a “reflection on the transience and transitions of existence, as well as beauty in the midst of great struggle or conflict.” Often using human imagery and beauty as a backdrop to encapsulate the experience of struggle and conflict, Max weaves his images together with intrigue and emotion.