Herbert Creecy American, 1939-2003
“Herbert Creecy was constantly renewing himself as an artist. He never rested on his earlier inventions but moved on to new ways of applying paint that were original and different from anything else.”
- Gudmund Vigtel
Herbert Creecy’s dense and exuberant paintings employ a range of experimental techniques that were ahead of his time. Though widely known for his “squiggles”, the scope of Creecy’s oeuvre demonstrates his immense ingenuity and technical virtuosity. Wildly prolific, his imagery and influences were unbounded by traditional constructs. He often re-purposed and painted over canvases to unearth new compositions, pushing the spatial boundaries of the traditional picture plane. Creecy’s methodology allows his work to maintain its integrity and complexity in almost all orientations. What always remains is a pure painterly expression of an internal landscape.
Heralded as the most significant Abstract Expressionist painter ever to come from the South, Creecy’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, as well as in a vast array of blue-chip corporate and private collections. A carefully curated collection of Herbert Creecy’s never-before-seen paintings at Johnson Lowe Gallery shines new light on this historic artist.
Herbert Creecy’s dense and exuberant paintings employ a range of experimental techniques that were ahead of his time. Though widely known for his “squiggles”, the scope of Creecy’s oeuvre demonstrates his immense ingenuity and technical virtuosity. Wildly prolific, his imagery and influences were unbounded by traditional constructs. He often re-purposed and painted over canvases to unearth new compositions, pushing the spatial boundaries of the traditional picture plane. Creecy’s methodology allows his work to maintain its integrity and complexity in almost all orientations. What always remains is a pure painterly expression of an internal landscape.
Widely acknowledged as Atlanta's most renowned painter, Herbert Creecy's “Southern-ness” gave him as much pride as lament; he was quoted to have often been disappointed with the limitations of the Atlanta arts scene. Yet, he never migrated nor disassociated from the regionality that was so integral to his identity. Abstract Expressionists like Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg are rarely attributed to the South; their artistic careers were launched out of and driven by New York, their narratives often stripped of their geographical origins. Herbert Creecy maintained impressive artistic influence from his Atlanta base, where his creative mastery earned him a rightful place in the arc of art history.
