Artist Elizabeth Gibbons
Illuminating the Possibilities

Since childhood I have been surrounded by art and influenced by art history. My parents were both professors of Italian Renaissance Art History, my father at Princeton University and my mother at Vassar College. Our family traveled extensively throughout Europe, visiting museums and churches and often lived for a year at a time in Italy. Much of my infancy was spent in Venice where I learned to walk. My early and constant exposure to art, travels with my family and my father’s struggle with manic-depressive illness set the stage for what would later become a fascination with surrealism, symbolism and the use of decorative and reflective materials in my own art.
In my personal quest to understand my father’s illness, the ensuing family dynamics and my own sensitivities, I majored in psychology at Vassar College with a minor in art history. I went on to attain a master’s degree in psychiatric social work. Feeling dissatisfied by the psychiatric model and tormented as a daily witness to such breakdown of the human spirit, I decided to pursue a career in art. At the time I was living in NYC and studied faux finishing and marble-izing with an English master who had worked in many palaces in England including the Queen’s. Following my studies with him, I moved to San Francisco and started my own business doing faux finishing. I also continued my artistic development, taking courses at the Day Studio, including color theory, gilding and trompe l’oeil. During the mid-80’s I met and worked as an apprentice for Tony Duquette, world-renowned artist, set designer for the San Francisco Opera and jewelry designer for the British nobility. I worked with Tony Duquette on The Canticle of the Sun, a celebrational environment created for the people of San Francisco and dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi. Through my work with Tony, I learned much about incorporating found objects, shells, fabric, jewelry, beads and mosaics. I was also witness to his genius and dream of uniting the arts by combining visual art, music and poetry to create an interactive experience for the viewer. I went on to study mosaic work at Sharon Studio and I also “created” three children who continue to inspire and direct my career.
Although I have taken numerous courses in art, I consider myself to be primarily self-taught and have developed my own unique style by combining a variety
of methods and techniques. As an artist I am both creator and alchemist. I begin with the lead of my everyday existence and transform it into the gold of spiritual enlightenment through the process of creating my art. Art is how I make sense of it all, how I illumine my life. Creating art, for me, has become the container which helps me to integrate the whole human experience, the beauty and the ugliness, the light and the shadows, the coexistence of opposites. Like the Symbolists of the late 19th century, I mine mythology and dream imagery for a visual language of the soul. My focus is on the magical, the mystical and the mysterious. When I begin a painting or work of art, I rarely do a preliminary sketch. I allow myself to be drawn to objects, colors or symbols and it is often these that inspire the direction I take. The use of reflective materials holds fascination for me because it represents the constant change and motion that are symbolic of life’s transience. My art captures shifting essences and is sensitive, like myself to external variations of light and environment. When I paint, it is usually with spray bottle in hand and I let the images emerge from the colors and the drips blending into each other. I travel through my creations, snippets of memory emerge in an altered form, the different selves that I have become throughout my life, combined with universal archetypes that I allow to surface from my unconscious. I am drawn to themes of transfiguration out of this world, to transformation and metamorphosis. My father’s illness that eventually ended in his tragic suicide, helped me to understand the longing for transcendence from spiritual imprisonment, a subject matter which permeates my art. In addition to being a visual artist, I am also a poet. The combination of text and image helps me to plunge more deeply into my own psychic underground and thus gives me access to “otherworldly realms.”
I would like to acknowledge the influences of other artists including El Greco whose art I saw in Venice, the more decorative style of the Art Nouveau movement including the work of Gustav Klimt and the work of Matisse. I would also include the surrealists such as Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and the Symbolists such as Odilon Redon. Tony Duquette has been a major influence and kindred spirit and last but
not least, my parents. I dedicate “The Door of Possibilities” to my father for which I have written a separate dedication. To my mother I dedicate this exhibit that I have entitled “Realms of Enchantment”. Without her tremendous courage and unflagging support I would not have been able to achieve what I have. I will always think of her as great symbol of connection for she has been the “glue” which has held our family together. For the many gifts my parents have given me, I thank them.

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