- Hi, my name is Greg Decker, and I'm a professional artist and oil painter.

I used to live in New York City, and now I live here in Nashville, Tennessee.

That's my mission, is to try to do the impossible and, or the possible, and make wonderful, magical image with oil paint.

It's rare for me to take a break, pretty hard worker, and I'm obsessed with painting, especially oil painting.

I'm not a purely observational painter, for instance.

A lot of times if I'm working with a still life or with a painting, there's things I'm really working for, my imagination and my visions, where I grew up was overseas, and there was no television, but there were books.

And my mother, who's a wonderful artist in her own right, she really turned me on to visual imagery.

So I was really immersed in what I saw in Africa as a very young child.

I grew up in the Belgian, at the time it was called the Belgian Congo.

It was actually pre-independence.

Now it's called the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But as a little boy, it was a very colorful childhood, and I saw a lot of patterning in the clothing, and that really influenced me, influenced my work later.

I mean, I'm really concerned with people just on an everyday basis because I am really concerned about how divided our country is, and I want to bring people together.

I think I'm influenced by really everybody and everything, influenced by what I see.

I'm really influenced by literature and people in literature, so I read a lot of poetry.

I think art is something that's in everybody's blood, whether they practice it or whether they're, because I think everybody is creative.

I've had people say to me, well, I'm not a very creative person.

And I say, you might not be creative visually, and you might not have explored that visually yet.

But everybody is creative.

I think that that's what being human is.

You create, you react to things, and in some fashion, either visually or musically, or intellectually or verbally, or through social interaction, I think harmony between people is beautiful.

I think art brings people together.

- [Narrator] This "NBT Arts Break" is made possible by the generous support of the Martha Rivers Ingram Advised Fund of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.