Mary Gibney, Artist

 

Hello and welcome to the 52nd 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview! This time I interviewed super cool artist Mary Gibney. She's great! Mary was kind enough to go to the show I curated in Stillwater and I've always really admired her style and unique approach to painting. Mary has a show called Funhouse Waiting Room opening February 4th at the awesome Rosalux Gallery in Minneapolis. You should go! Mary's answers to these questions were inspiring and I think you will agree. Thank you for reading! (Instagram: @marygibneyart  Website: www.marygibneyart.com / All images courtesy of the artist)

Jackson: How did you choose the life of an artist? Did something specific inspire you?

Mary: Like many artists I really liked to draw things when I was a kid, the act of making something was very important to me. My first artistic memory was being frustrated by a kindergarten art project that wasn't going according to my vision of how it *should* look, but even though it wasn't perfect I persisted, which has sort have been my lifetime routine of how I paint and make things. Almost all my paintings start with an idea that changes in some way while I'm working on it. For me, frustration can access something deeper. I work until it is right, whatever that means. In that sense I think the elements of color and pattern have to come together in a way that also reflects feeling. I value emotion over skill.

Jackson: How do you choose the subjects for your paintings? Are you influenced by you surroundings?

Mary: My subjects have varied over the years. I really love painting faces so I have found inspiration in vintage mugshots, bar patrons, faces of strangers in a crowd. Also circus sideshow performers and so-called freaks, bodies and body parts. Lately I've been painting bar scenes, full of imaginary characters. In that case I am influenced by my surroundings, since I love a good dive bar, especially to hear live music. It's very freeing to make up these situations because in art there are no rules!

Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?

Mary: I would love to spend a day with Alice Neel, hanging out in her living room as she paints. Just to watch her brushstrokes and color choices and listen as she chats with her subject. I saw a wonderful retrospective of her art last year in New York, and her lifetime body of work is so inspiring. Her apartment is still intact, with canvases stacked in the halls and leaning on walls, so I'm hoping one day it will be an Alice Neel house museum.

Maria Orozco, Artist

 

Hello and welcome to the 51st 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview! This time I interviewed Mexico based artist Maria Orozco. I discovered her art on Instagram and I love how unique it is and I especially like the clean lines and edges, and through this interview I discovered that we both admire Carmen Herrera. It is always interesting for me to interview artists from other countries to get a different perspective. I found Maria's answers super interesting and I think you will too! Thank you for reading! (Instagram: @mariaarte0 Website: www.mariaarte.com / All images courtesy of the artist)   

Jackson: Do you feel like you were born to be a visual artist? Or did you have an experience that made you want to be an artist?

Maria: I consider that when you are a child there is no total conception of the profession that you want to adopt when you grow up, however when you are a child you develop skills that lead you to what you like. In my case my father was an architect and he liked to paint, which caused my interest in painting since I was a child, thanks to my father my approach to the plastic arts and architecture was there since I was a child.

Jackson: I really like your style. Do you feel like your art is influenced by what you see around you or are there other factors?

Maria: Thanks! Everything is always influenced, nobody invents the black thread. In my pictorial exercise I retake the conformation of geometric compositions as a reference to the forms and conception of Constructivism and Brutalism, from its historical booms to the traces that in the present maintain the impact of its origins. Provoking an exercise of plastic interpretation of the forms, the space and the emptiness with which I compose on the canvases, forms that can be appreciated from the juxtaposition of elements and their sizes, to the detail of influences of Hard Edge painting. 

Painting is the constant means of my process to combine the conceptual and transversal interests of my professional knowledge and curiosity to find new ways of self-interpretation.     

Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?

Maria: I would love to meet several artists but if we are being specific this would be my top 5:

1. Inge Dick

2. Auguste Herbin

3. Theo van Doesburg

4. Carmen Herrera

5. Le Corbusier

I admire the work of each of them, I consider it super interesting how they projected themselves creatively in their respective times and countries.

Betsy Ruth Byers, Artist

 

Hello and welcome to the 50th 3 Art Questions With Jackson interview with Betsy Ruth Byers! 50! I have been to several of Betsy's exhibitions since I was 12 years old and I have always loved her use of color and how her paintings are a different type of abstract painting. As I expected, I loved her answers and I think you will too! Thank you for reading! (Instagram: @betsyruthbyers Website: www.betsyruthbyers.com / Images 1 and 4 courtesy of the artist)

Jackson: How did you end up on an artistic life path? Did you have a specific experience?

Betsy: When I was a kid I loved to draw and observe outside. My parents were both teachers, so I was lucky enough to have long stretches of time up up north at my grandma's cabin and farm...I spent many mornings on the dock trying to capture the linework of the waves. It never occurred to me to be an artist when I grew up. Looking back, I intuitively knew that drawing was a way for me to see better and therefore begin to understand the natural relationships spread out before me.

I went to a liberal arts undergrad institution because I enjoyed studying many things. I thought I might pursue medicine or architecture. I ended up taking oil painting for the first time my sophomore year and that was it! I fell in love with the process and the possibilities that it offered. I declared an art major with an environmental studies concentration. My path has weaved back and forth in the decades that followed, but my work continues to intersect with landscape, science and the power of observation and imagination. 

Jackson: I've noticed when encountering your work that nature plays a big part. Do you think that nature informs your painting or that your painting is about nature?

Betsy: I love this question. I would say both...I think from the beginning nature has informed my work. I grapple with questions such as: How does the landscape make us feel? How do I translate deep space? How can I capture the beauty of peripheral light reflecting off the water? The paintings usually begin inspired by multiple photographs I have taken on research trips. Somehow in the process of painting a transformation or flip takes place...the work does become about nature. Ultimately, I am working from a place of empathy for the natural world and I am hopeful that my viewers can feel this when they spend time with my work. 

Jackson: If you could meet any artist living living or dead, who would it be and why?

Betsy: There are so many! If I have to pick one today, I would say Claire Sherman. Her paintings are full of life and movement and capture both the visceral and quiet moments in the landscape. I admire how her brush strokes form planes that expand into larger forms. I would love to peak inside of her studio and see her process!

Farida Hughes, Artist

 

Hello and welcome to the 49th 33 Art Questions With Jackson interview! This time I interviewed the super impressive Farida Hughes, an artist I really admire and who enjoys using color in her work as much as I do. I had loved her Instagram and then became even more of a fan when I saw her work in a show at one of my favorite galleries - Catherine G Murphy Gallery. Her thoughts about art were very interesting to me and I am sure they will be to you too! Thank you for reading! (Instagram: @faridahughes_artist / Images 1, 3 and 4 courtesy of the artist) 

Jackson: What inspired your interest in making art? Are you from an artistic family? Did you have an experience that stayed with you?

Farida: There isn't one thing that I can identify that inspired my art-making. My father was a chemical engineer and would sometimes bring home technical drawings he made, but I didn't understand any of that aside from being impressed by the giant rolls of paper and blue lines. My mother came from a farming background and has a strong DIY attitude about everything. I am certain that influenced me early on. I was always "good at art" and I think I got that identity moniker among the kids in grade school. I would lose myself in art work. As a young girl on the many long car trips with family I would occupy myself by taking my fingers and framing little compositions of shapes, lines, and colors as I saw things go by out the window. I told this memory to a friend when I was in graduate school and she said "You were born to be an artist!" Doodling and dreaming are pleasant activities easily accomplished, but the desire to arrange in place all the necessary things to bring something of visual communication into the world, (time, space, energy, tools, and supplies), that is a different kind of drive and passion. Probably seeing people around me build and make things helped influence me on this path.

Jackson: I love your use of color and I respond to it because I also love using color. How did you settle on the use of bright colors in your work? What does it mean to you personally?

Farida: Color is everything. I embrace color; to me it is the driving force in my work. Color choice don't always inform my composition, but once I choose a color to begin with it definitely informs the composition to the end. I use color both metaphorically and allegorically, letting it stand in for social or political ideas I might want to express. Exploring both the visual and the physical weight of color is a back and forth process in painting, like a little dance, that is so engaging but sometimes also infuriating. People often ask me, especially with my Blends project, if I assign a color to a meaning, like a label, but I work hard to stay away from that. Color is infinitely variable, like humanity, so that, to me, is poetically important. The choices and combinations are endless. For a time I really disliked primary colors because they were so absolute, and intentionally chose a palette based on the secondary, tertiary, and the "grays" of intermixing, but I have explored in primaries in recent years years and found that I can like them when I edge them toward difference. I do think my practice of incorporating my colors into resin makes them brighter, more intense. This vibrancy makes them seem more colorful, however, I am using the exact same paints I use when I paint with oils on canvas. There is something about the way light passes through the medium that affects how we experience the color. All of this makes painting so exciting!

Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?

Farida: Today, I would have to say I would love to meet the living artist Amy Sillman. She is an extraordinary painter, but also a critic, a writer, and a teacher. She seems to know everybody, or at least their art. She has something to say about everything, and does so articulately and with wit and intelligence most don't match. She doesn't take herself too seriously, and approaches both life and the work in the studio with a sense of humor that makes this task of "being an artist" all the more human. I would love to hang out with her in front of a huge Gerhard Richter abstract painting and geek out about paint, Darth Vader, the sides of barns, or whatever else came to mind, and savor the bits of wisdom that those random mental exercises inevitably reveal.