A love of painting is immediately revealed in the work of Liz Gribin. She is indeed a "painterly" painter. Within that, she creates a poetic atmosphere and a sensitive and refreshing rendering of the figure which is rare today. Elegant abstraction lends a sense of structure to the relationship of figure to background and gives solidity to these sometimes fragile "out of the air" images.
"Larry Rivers and Liz Gribin, currently exhibiting in Southampton, each exemplify a reverence for a linear approach to the surface of the work that is too often underappreciated ..." Click here for more...
"Color is the most outstanding aspect of Gribin's pictures - it is original... ...Her washes have a pattern all their own. The manner is casual, the poses of her figures, their attitudes, are almost offhand. It is her skillful drawing that gives us the subject matter."
"Abstraction can push a familiar scene to the limit of recognizability. Liz Gribin takes similar liberties with the human figure and it's surroundings in her canvas, 'Noblesse Oblige,' which took one of the (Heckscher Museum) show's top prizes"
Her pursuit of gallery exposure was less a priority than that of making art, and discovering the paths where it would lead her - her sense of direction is a good one. Surely there are influences. The placement of her figures owes something to an involvement with Japanese prints, whose specialness had equal appeal to Monet and Whistler. Though she does not make portraits in the conventional sense, her figure studies are of every woman, combining universal symbols of such female characteristics as angst, empathy and dormant power. Her color is subtle, luminous. There is a sweep in the attenuated brush strokes, a savoring of the medium. Her paintings are timeless, set in no particular era, but reflecting a feeling of elegance rather than grunge. At this stage in her life, Liz Gribin is an artist free to devote herself entirely to the passion that has sustained her interest and commitment for nearly six decades. Living in the art colony known as "The Hamptons", she has multiple benefits: the light that so entranced the artists Childe Hassam and Thomas Moran, a hundred years ago, and Fairfield Porter and Willem de Kooning in the recent past; the enriching view of sky and trees as seen from her huge studio window. This artist's quiet authority is apparent both in person and in her work."
Nevertheless we sense her admiration for the work of artists as diverse as Matisse and Diebenkorn in her canvases - there's even a slight air of Modigliani about her figures, seen in a space that moves from shallow to deep across the picture plane. The figures are emotionally loaded. It's not, however, facial expressions that carry the emotion but their postures and placement in space. Often the background in these pictures seems to merge with the figures, and there is, in the composition, a cubist feel in the way pictorial elements interrelate. Ms. Gribin's drawing lends the pictures a classically modernist feel. She draws directly on the canvas, but she can also draw with paint. Because acrylic dries quickly, she is able to add color in layers, and this gives all of her works, no matter how carefully structured, an improvisational feel; they are infused with genuine liveliness. The combination of acrylic and charcoal also gives the pictures extra texture. Colors, too, are remarkably handled. Just this side of bright, they are varied and balanced, crossing the spectrum. It's in her use of color that Ms. Gribin reminds me of painters as different as Bonnard and Braques. By internalizing so many modernist influences, and by finding her own particular way of locating a figure in interior space, and letting the picture take shape, each time, as an experiment in form, Liz Gribin has found her own distinct niche in contemporary art."
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