Margo Kren
B.S., University of Wisconsin
M.A., Kansas State University
M.F.A., University of Iowa

In the summer of 1998 I traveled to Greece for my own Odyssey around the islands to see the ancient vases, sculptures, and murals of Mikonos, Koronos, and Santorini. Then I rented a car and I went upon the mountains and into the Peloponnesus and circled around the mainland going into Greek villages of Tripoli, Pylos, Kalamata, Argos, Patra, Steno, Sparti, Korinthos, and Megalopolis. Later these names of villages became the titles of my paintings. I discovered everywhere the Greek chapel boxes used to invoke the saints along side the roads, near lakes sides, and in the center of parking lots! These are by no means small boxes but can be up to 8 feet tall. There were no kits for these ornate shrines but instead they were made of found objects and came straight from the heart.

I stopped again and again to take photographs, using the camera to record quickly when a drawing would have been impossible given the amount of time I had. When I returned to the States, I used these slides to project the chapel boxes onto 5' x 4' canvases. With charcoal I drew the image onto the surface and began to paint in oil. After a while the paintings appeared competent enough buy they looked like Hallmark card renditions. I started reversing my colors for a sense of another reality. Where there was green in the leaves I put red! I started using paint as it were a collaged piece of paper, made up of variations on the images I had seen in the ancient sculptures and murals of the islands, for example of Greek figures and heads-"Goddess with Snakes", Greek idols and Cycladic heads (sacred with the profane). All of this provided a "worm hole" between the ancient and the contemporary. the works have the appearance of assortments of non-associated images without direction. This freed me from having to illustrate a story line. in this way, the images can interrupt each other and suggest a pattern of thoughts that one might have in an afternoon walk down a street, as various stimuli trigger seemingly unrelated thoughts that are true only to the person who has them. I would label it lateral thinking.

Margo Kren
Spring 2006