Falling Off the End of The World

Falling Off the End of The World: Faces In Gregg Stone’s Velvet Dragons Exhibition

Michael Sedano

Viewers will think whatever they’re prepared to see in the woman’s portrait. Who is she? How’d she get here? What happens to her after this day? Gregg Stone points at the figure and puts context into the painting 

In Mexico a man, a breadwinner, can abandon a woman and children with no accountability. A single mother left to fend for herself and her kids needs money every day. Some women, like this woman, turn to the streets to get the cash to survive. Velvet Dragons is a show about such women.

Gregg narrates wistfully. This woman wears an ineffable innocence, her ojos hinchados look directly at the viewer. The longer one looks at her face the more her youth evaporates into sorrowful inevitability at what is to come. The woman’s boyfriend has her hooked on heroin. Criminals kidnap the woman and cut her body to pieces when the boyfriend doesn’t pay his debts. She leaves three kids behind.

Stone paints realist portraits of prostitutes and life in Tijuana’s Zona Norte. Stone’s Velvet Dragons exhibition, curated by Man One at Chinatown’s Eastern Projects Gallery, (link) surveys the artist’s thirty-five year exploration of this Tijuana milieu.

Earlier work on small canvas, reflect Stone’s enduring interest in architectural shape and color, elements to flavor his portraits with authenticity and ambiente. Stone's backgrounds define the scene and the artist devotes as much skill to setting as to subject. Several of the structures, now razed, exist only in memory and Stone's watercolors.

Later paintings in the show reflect an artist increasingly satisfied with his medium and evolving style. Gregg decides to work big. His more recent, large scale paintings, are the exhibition’s attention-holding focus.

Calling Gregg Stone’s work compelling understates what holds viewers to linger at each painting. Prurience may fuel some viewers, along with voyeuristic fascination with honest portraits of desperation and pain. Artists and critical viewers will linger at each hanging to study Stone’s control of layered watercolor and photo realism. Everyone will bring their own eyes to the exhibition to fill in the stories.

Gregg Stone engages visitors with puro enjoyment and intimate details of a painting

Faces, settings , bodies, clothing, light, shadow, tell stories and raise questions. At first sight, the subject’s story is the whole painting. Linger and make eye contact with that woman and her story becomes personal, not hers, yours and whatever you make of that person frozen in the moment.

A Gregg Stone painting tells its own story and on its face that is the story. Talk to Gregg about a painting and he grows wistful and wet-eyed with memory. Like writers write what they know, Gregg Stone paints what he knows. He knows these people and the spaces they inhabit. His is a welcome presence among his subjects. Stone has turned an understanding ear to these people for a quarter century. Stone returns their openness by creating unjudging portraits of people many viewers approach with bias and pejoration.

Gregg Stone's brush and pen find people at the end of their rope, tilting at the edge of the world. What comes after remains in the collector's imagination, outside the frame.

Gregg Stone grows emotional narrating the career of the woman in the painting.

A short-haired woman stands back to window, about to light a cigarette. Her clothes hang from rods positioned above her mattress. Tubing curls on her dresser top, a medication bottle tells us this person is ill and alone. 

The painting is a diptych. In the second frame purple cloth hangs from the ceiling covering half the wall’s institutional green paint typical in cheap Mexican dwellings. A yellow tablecloth decorates the backrest of a sarape-covered couch. Demanding visual stimulation in her space, the woman has affixed prints to the soffit running across her ceiling. The woman’s world is a confined emptiness.

Stone relates the woman is from the United States. A lot of the workers here come from el otro lado. This woman’s life’s path brings her to this emptiness, to TJ to work the streets. Here is her refuge, her private world.

Her boyfriend addicts her to heroin and methamphetamine. When the asshole doesn’t pay his debts, gangsters drop this woman from the international bridge. 

White Fence, a well-recognized Boyle Heights gang, is the context of a diptych that stops people in their tracks. The right side, white lettering on black field, offers a roster of names including Spooky Travieso Grumpo Droopy, and a pair of cartoonish homies posed like temple pillars guarding massive letters, WF. 

On the left, a woman looks toward those placas. She is tattooed on arms, neck, jaw, cheek. Despite the bright illumination, sunglasses rest above the bill of her cap. One tattoo, W on her right arm, suggests she’s from White Fence. 

Something happened, she had nowhere else to go, and now she works TJ streets. Maybe she’s thinking of those placas and how there’s no place like home.

Eastern Projects Gallery occupies the corner of College Street and Broadway in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. It’s a short walk from the metro. The spacious gallery hosted a Magu retrospective recently and Eastern Projects is establishing itself as an important showcase for arte. 

The opening night, July 25, was a celebration of Stone’s work and a reunion of friends and collectors. The Artist Talk on Saturday, August 1, 2026 | 5:00 - 8:00 PM promises to bring many of the same gente to Chinatown.

Also on display is Stone's personal collection of prison work, renderings of imaginary women, cars, text, anguished people, on starkly white tee shirts and pañuelos. 

Gregg Stone’s work is precious but his prices are in the low thousands. I see no red dots during my stay. Gregg tells me he’s happy to share the work, understands chacun à son goût rules the market and his work isn’t for every taste. Maybe. I observed a dealer approach the artist proposing a deal to sell all the paintings. That's what salespeople call a definite maybe.

Velvet Dragons runs through August 22. Eastern Projects Gallery opens noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

Fotos From An Exhibition

Author Hiroko Falkenstein, Gregg Stone's wife, greets visitors. La Bloga reviewed Falkenstein's recent Alzheimer's caregiver's story (link).

Mario Trillo, photographer and fashionista artist, with a friend.

A browser examines each pañuelo, giving the work well-deserved appreciation.

Gregg Stone enjoys conversation with visitors and potential collectors.