Greta Van Campen distills the world around her into prismatic, clean-edged images that visually thrum with clear notes of color. Reducing still life and landscape elements to essential forms, she pictures nature and domesticity as ordered arrangements of flat, abstracted shapes. Ocean and sky radiate from the horizon as swathes of fractured color or raking triangles of light. Islands, mountains, and trees appear as silhouettes, anchoring the expanse of land and sea. Growing up in an artistic household, her parents are artists Tim and Susan Van Campen, and now the mother of two small daughters with her partner Mike, Van Campen has recently been "thinking about 'home' and what that means to me." Several new interior scenes—spare, elegant still lifes inspired by her parent's home—are tone poems to treasured objects. "My life and my work are closely connected," she says. "There's no real separation for me, so in a sense, I paint what I live."
Van Campen received her BA with a major in Visual Art from Bowdoin College. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at On Center Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Firecat Projects, Chicago, IL; Garage Gallery, Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT; Hespe Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Octavia Art Gallery, New Orleans, LA; and Gallery BOM, Boston, MA, and included in numerous group shows throughout the United States. She has had residencies at Brush Creek Arts, Saratoga, WY; Wrangell Mountains Center, McCarthy, AK; and Borestone Mountain Audobon Sanctuary, Elliotsville, ME. She lives and works in Thomaston, ME.