Weldon & Beyond Art Show: Talking with Artist Janey Gregory
“Most interesting to me is the blending and blurring of the sky with the land, where they meet on the horizon – that magical intersection of the two becoming one.”
Weldon & Beyond Art Show: Talking with Artist Janey Gregory
The Weldon & Beyond Art Show is excited to welcome home artist Janey Gregory, a Weldon native, who now resides in Indianapolis. As Janey describes it, her passion for the arts started at a young age. She attended Weldon City Schools for elementary and middle school, then moved on to Enfield Academy and completed high school at St. Mary’s College in Raleigh. Next, she began her formal training as an artist at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Realizing she would need to subsidize her passion for the arts with a more lucrative career, Janey entered the Master of Architecture program at N.C. State University. During the four-year course of study, she spent what would become a life-changing summer at L’Ecole D’Art et Architecture Americaine, an art and architecture school in Fontainebleau, France. Her participation there led to her winning the Meyer Levy Grand Prix award, which afforded her a year abroad at Citi International Des Arts in Paris, France. It was there that Janey met her husband, Ghani Belmaachi, a highly regarded international artist from Marrakech, Morocco. They now have been together for 39 years!
Janey returned to the States to receive her architecture degree and was recruited to RTKL Associates, a renowned international architecture firm based in Baltimore, Maryland. While living in Baltimore, Janey and her husband became parents to their son, Zak. The family eventually moved to Seattle and later to Shanghai; then to Washington, D.C., and eventually to Indianapolis.
Recently, in March 2024, Janey retired from her accomplished 40+ year architectural career to pursue her love of painting and the visual arts.
Janey kindly agreed to share some thoughts about her art and hometown roots:
Tell us about your artistic vision and what art show attendees can expect to see from you at the Weldon & Beyond Art Show:
I consider myself a multimedia artist who, from age five, has experimented in drawing, crafts, photography, pen and ink, printmaking, sculpture, stained glass, oil painting, acrylics, gouache, watercolor, and now, soft pastels. My first encounter with soft pastels was when I took a job at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia, at age 21 as a portrait artist. I immediately fell in love with the velvety texture and wide range of intense, luminous hues this medium offers. And years later, throughout my architectural career, I used pastels to color the sky and ground plane when rendering my building designs.
The work I will be displaying in the Weldon & Beyond Art Show is focused on the spiritual essence of PLACE, images of scenes in nature that continue to speak to me. I paint what I feel, not what I see – abstract landscapes of lost edges and ghosted imprints, like an elusive dream that you kind of remember yet can’t really decipher. It’s not the specifics that matter to me, but rather the impression and feeling of a place stripped of all detail, showing only its naked beauty and spirit. I’m interested in juxtaposing dark with light, drama with calm, wild with tame – the same dualities we experience in our everyday lives that also show up in nature. Most interesting to me is the blending and blurring of the sky with the land, where they meet on the horizon – that magical intersection of the two becoming one.
You’ve had a stellar career as an architect that has allowed you to travel extensively and live in some of the world’s most vibrant cities. Shanghai, for example, is quite different from our small hometown of Weldon. What was that contrast like for you?
I actually had a strong sense of continuity with my family history when I lived in Shanghai. I worked in mainland China designing larger than life iconic structures and traveling the country delivering presentations to clients. Most ironic was the realization that I was walking on the same soil in Shanghai as my grandfather, Quentin Gregory of Halifax, walked exactly 100 years earlier. He spent 15 years abroad working for the British American Tobacco Company before returning home to marry my grandmother, Nelle Haynes Gregory.
Fast forward to today, tell us more about your ties with Weldon and Halifax County. What brings you back and how do you stay connected?
North Carolina, more specifically, Halifax County, is where I’m most rooted emotionally and where I feel most at home. I’ve lived in many places over the course of my life, both the East and West Coasts, Paris and Shanghai for a stint, and now, the Midwest. The deep significance and nostalgia of my early childhood days growing up in Weldon shaped me into the women I am today, and I am forever grateful.
Additionally, my three sisters, whom I adore beyond words, all live in North Carolina (Roanoke Rapids, Marshall, and Asheville). We are very close; we talk as a sisterhood weekly on a four-way conference call every Tuesday evening. Having recently inherited the family home in Halifax after my father passed in 2019, we meet up regularly there to hang out with each other, celebrate holidays together, and take care of the estate. More than these blood ties, I am a Southern girl inside and out, whose childhood was shaped by the rich cultural and personal history, community, and landscape of Halifax County. No matter where I live or travel, I take with me the living tapestry of my Weldon years forever etched on my heart.
Interview and edits by Janey Gregory and Bert Kittner, April 2024
