Lari Gibbons' drawings and prints have their proximate source in the impact of development on the native woodlands where she lives. Using branches cut from felled trees, birds and birdhouses as motifs, the drawings and prints attend to human dwelling and its environmental impact.
The title of the Still Green series references a test performed by arborists to adduce the condition of a tree; though the leaves have begun to dry and curl, the core of the branches are still green. As distinct from a cut staff:
that shall no more put forth leaves or shoots, . . . neither shall it again grow green, for the bronze [axe] has stripped it of leaves and bark. 1
For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease . . . yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. 2
Thus, there is at once an elegiac aspect and an aspect of hope in the motif of branches of drying leaves. So also the mezzotints Seed I-IV: acorns are the possibility of oaks.
The motif of bird perched on a stump is ancient, occurring in Lascaux Cave in juxtaposition to a dead man and a bison, and in Greek iconology, where an oracular function was attributed to a bird on a pole in an oak grove.3 Here, in the charcoal drawing Dwellings VIII and the mezzotint Dwellings VII, the motif engages the transformation of the natural environment of the bird's dwelling to a cultural environment of human habitation. This is extended in the mezzotint Dwellings III, with the culturally constructed bird house supplanting the absent bird nest.
Gibbons' charcoal drawings are intensely observed, with meticulously developed chiaroscuro. The mezzotints are a natural extension of Gibbons' charcoal drawings. The mezzotint process entails rocking a copper plate with a mezzotint rocker, raising a ground of burrs and pits holding ink to print a deep, rich velvet black, which is scraped and burnished back to white and intermediate values. 4 It is a laborious process, best suited for carefully developed images of relatively small scale, and like the charcoal drawings requiring both intensive observation and careful and methodical development of value.
Connoisseurship of virtuoso technique is its own reward. The reward of engagment with these works subsumes that, as do the works themselves, within a larger and deeper reflection on dwelling. As Mikel Dufrenne urges:
The depth of the aesthetic object is measured by the depth of the existence to which it invites us. Its depth is correlative with ours. 5
Lari Gibbons is Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Arts, the University of North Texas. Gibbons received the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the Bachelor of Arts from Grinnell College, with additional study in drawing and printmaking at the University of Iowa. Among more than one hundred exhibitions in the last decade, Gibbons' recent solo exhibitions include: Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska; Chadron State College; Barret Art Center, Poughkeepsie; Rosewood Arts Center, Kettering, Ohio. She is represented by Pan American Art Gallery, Dallas.