I came of age playing baseball and listening to Led Zeppelin while spending much of my youth in West Palm Beach, FLorida.

After escaping to my birthplace, Montreal, and living in San Francisco, New York, Paris and Pittsburgh, I returned to Florida in 2006. In order to make peace with my past I decided to accept all that tortured me about the Sunshine State: rampant commercialism, rootlessness, driving everywhere, air conditioning, superficial individualism, and so forth.

With acceptance came a gift: the need for new paintings and a new paradigm. While painting on plywood scraps in my father's cabinet shop I began to think about what Florida's energy
represents and what I could do to manipulate and transform it into something that I could find warmth and solace in. That was when I thought of Joseph Beuys's 1974 work, "Energy Plan forthe Western Man". I wanted to take a painterly approach to similar questions of energy, power, and affirmation in the face of isolation, alienation, and
superficiality.

I became "George Greek" in honor of the Spanish history of my home and in homage to my Greek identity that was renewed by living near my parents for the first time in my life as an adult.

-Jorge Griego