User:ThomasD~enwiki

Frederick [Rick] Gregory is a sculptor and occasional poet living in the Carmel Valley of California. His chosen medium is granite, particularly that of Sierra Nevada where he grew up. His work and study in Brazil and Japan are also obvious influences in his work.

Gregory was born in 1938 in Lake County, north of the Bay Area, and spent his formative years in the central Sierra and Fresno. His formal training, at what is now San Francisco State University, was in engineering and history, but his college job as a hod carrier, lugging bricks for construction, introduced him to masonry, and then to stone. Returning to Fresno in the early 70s, Gregory worked for landscape architect Kodo Matsubara and rock garden designer Matusco Shibata. There he began to develop his eye for the relationship of stone and water which drives much of the sculpture he has produced since.

In the mid-70s, Gregory left the United States, traveling to Japan before settling in Brazil for nearly fifteen years. In Rio, a world center of granite, he worked extensively with architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx, creating and installing many sculptures and gardens.

Returning to the US in 1988, Gregory ultimately settled in the Carmel Valley. He now has more than fifty large pieces in projects around the country, including New York, New Orleans, Jackson Hole, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and the San Francisco Area. Many of his pieces now include running water as an integral feature, and Gregory has become increasingly focused on the relationship between the granite mountains of California and the monumental rivers that flow from them. His sculpture and his poetry speak to that interest.

Gregory is represented by the Hawthorne Gallery in Big Sur.