THE ARTIST - Chris Gregg 

I have been a professional painter for 10 years now but have been painting all my life and sold many hundreds of paintings and illustrations in that time. I have also been fascinated by military uniforms and battles for as long as I can remember, and been a model soldier collector and wargamer since 1965.

I mostly specialised in landscape painting as a paying hobby while working as a Civil Servant until early retirement beckoned. Although I lived in Cheltenham nearly all my life, where I had regularly been a successful exhibitor at “Art in the Park” since the 1970s, I moved to Oakridge Lynch between Stroud and Cirencester a few years ago to enjoy life deep in the Cotswold hills where I have a custom built studio. The Gloucestershire countryside has been a constant delight to me for 50 years.

I always favour a realistic style of painting or drawing with either water soluble oil colours or acrylics, or occasionally pen and ink wash. I aim to give an artistic interpretation to landscapes or historic subjects, and not just a bland “button-counting” rendition of uniforms or reproduction of a pretty photograph. I always use many reference works and often use real live models with reproduction uniforms and weapons and equipment to get authentic and interesting poses. 

As a spin off from illustrating for a wargaming magazine, I  started the “Hussarette Project” in 2012, taking the theme of some actual Napoleonic ladies disguised in (or out of) military uniforms to render colourful, sometimes amusing, sometimes risqué, studies that have become collector items. I have been fortunate so far to use six ladies as models and to date have reached Hussarette painting Number 28.

Over the decades I have exhibited in many places - at Art exhibitions, Art and craft centres, galleries, a theatre foyer, an airport terminal, cafes and pubs, gatherings of military enthusiasts and for charity events. My family and I lived in Australia for three years and I was fortunate to sell well at the famous Camberwell Art Exhibition in Melbourne.  My works are in private collections on several continents, at least in UK, France, Greece, USA and Australia and many more locations I’m unaware of! In recent years I have been privileged to have my military and Hussarette drawings and paintings collected by some internationally prominent wargamers and model soldier company owners.

In addition to military and landscape subjects I have a lively interest in rendering history, fantasy, portraiture and figure studies in oil and acrylic, and besides the images in the various galleries on this site, more of my earlier work can be seen on my old web pages; click here for details.

Since early 2018 I have also been putting images of all my paintings on Instagram, please take a look and follow me; click here for details.