” A family road-trip to San Fransisco in 1969, and specifically, Mom buying me a set of paints at a head shop in Haight-Ashbury, was probably the most influential experience of my young artistic life”.
BIOGRAPHY
Gregory Gibboney, (b. 1957, Santa Monica, CA) is a professional artist working in water media on various surfaces. After living and working in the High Sierra near Lake Tahoe for over thirty-five years with his wife Therese, they now reside near McCall, Idaho.
Primarily a self-taught artist and designer with a life-long love of drawing and painting, Gregory’s desire to learn and make a living in a creative field led to careers in a variety of disciplines including graphic design, sign painting, screen printing and architecture. This commercial experience has had a profound effect on his fine art, both technically and aesthetically, over the past twenty-plus years. Although there have been some detours and distractions along the way, the landscape and nature continues to be his primary subject. Experiments with materials and techniques are an ongoing effort to keep the work interesting and fresh.
Since first showing his work publicly in 1999, Gregory has developed a respectable list of private and corporate collectors throughout the United States and in the United Kingdom. His paintings were exhibited by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artist’s Gallery for over ten years, and he has been featured at other galleries and art fairs around Northern California. He was included in a group exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art and was also one of the first mixed-media artists to be accepted into the Sausalito Art Festival.
Since 2006 he has been showing and selling his work through various online channels.
LANDSCAPES
Even before living in the mountains, where the outdoor environment and it’s seasonal changes are so dramatic, I was drawn to the landscape as a subject for my drawings and paintings. Although the work shown here is from a few different series, involving different techniques and mediums, they are all connected by my intuitive style of working with materials and color.
Some of the landscape work, such as the Seasons Series, is influenced by my professional experience in design and architecture. Combining the constraints of a grid with the completely unrestrained wilderness creates a contrast of forms and composition that I find endlessly challenging and visually stimulating.
In another series, titled Displacement, prints and drawings were combined to create mixed media work featuring dead or dying trees “displaced” into a living landscape. Another juxtaposition, but this time in medium as well as subject matter.
I have always made a point of truthfully exposing the process in my work. What may be perceived as unfinished is actually telling a story and developing a dialogue between the viewer and myself about how the piece was created.
ROSES FOR THERESE
Following a major surgery, my wife Therese decided to dry the flowers she was given while in the hospital, and they were hanging in our house. As caregiver, I was unable to get outdoors to draw or paint so the flowers grabbed my interest and eventually became my subject. Up to that point, I had not done much representational work, but the process turned out to be a beneficial escape. Tedious detail, which I normally avoided, was actually enjoyable and therapeutic. With each new piece, my natural brush work returned to compliment the realism. The results were both pleasing and cathartic.
Roses for Therese became the largest and most personal group of paintings I have produced to date. Emotions from a difficult time in our lives are unsympathetically exposed in this work, and I will always appreciate the healing they provided.
