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440 Gallery Artist :: Karen Gibbons |
 Karen Gibbons is a life-long artist. She is an explorer by nature and has made art in many media. Currently she has been making primarily sculpture and drawings, as well as paintings that contain aspects of both.
Karen’s life explorations have taken her many places: She is the mother of three children. She is a writer/poet; author of a book of drawings and poems with Rebecca Aidlin. She and her husband, Peter Reich renovated an old Victorian and ran a bed and breakfast on the banks of the Upper Delaware River. She is a registered yoga instructor, teaching classes and workshops. She is also a board certified creative arts therapist, working with children in an elementary school.
All along the way, an attitude of playful good humor, observation and openness has informed her life and her art. In the end, Gibbons sees creativity as a constant, intending to make life a creative adventure.
Visit her web site at www.karengibbonsart.com.
WORK
STATEMENT
I am influenced by my neighborhood-- an area of Brooklyn with boxy buildings and great swaths of sky. Colors and textures are continually changed by light and reflection. Around the neighborhood, I find discarded objects that speak to me of this vanishing industrial landscape and use them as skeletons for my sculpture.
In my work landscape and dreamscape are strong elements. Curious shapes are coupled with soft and ephemeral surfaces. Texture and glowing color convey emotional information. Images are prone to transformation. Outer influences evolve into more interior ideas of being at home with the body and the mind. In this way the work intentionally contains contradictions.
For me being at home means that I have a sense of comfort with ever-changing circumstance. This work explores passions and demons in a rich layering of color, form and texture. My method is to play with these relationships, finding a way to be unafraid of insecurity by allowing ambiguity to become the subject matter. Some say that we are truly at home with ourselves when we can be “free from fixed mind”. My art is my best hope for enlightenment.
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