Gillian Theobald

Seattle artist Gillian Theobald walks a fine line between abstraction and reality. Her landscapes turn plants into abstracted color gestures, effectively removing a sense of place in the process of embedding mood. This leaves one with the immediacy of recognition without the ability to nail anything down, suspending the viewer in a wash of colored space. Her graphite plein air drawings are tonic, restoring that very grounded feeling that her paintings seek to diffuse. This dance has its roots in her collage works, a practice she heavily explored in the 70’s and 80’s, where her use of found packaging and ephemera retains the trace of history while bending into a new kind of landscape of relationships.