She creates a poetic atmosphere and a sensitive and refreshing rendering of the figure which is rare today.
“It’s not so much reproducing what I see,” Gribin said, explaining her painting style. “It’s the body language or the gesture of the model that I’m trying to capture.”
"What I responded to in Liz's work," Leitzes says, "is the juxtaposition between sadness and beauty. There's a real emotion beneath the surface."
Influences include Japanese art, which Gribin was drawn to during her tenure at Boston University, Matisse for his use of color, drawings by Picasso, and Californian artist Richard Diebenkorn.
In 1985, Gribin had a show at the Isis Gallery in Port Washington, New York, which art critic Malcom Preston reviewed favorably in Newsday. “Color is the most outstanding aspect of Gribin’s pictures - it is original...,” Preston wrote.
"Thanks to Liz and her diligent and dedicated efforts, fine art was brought to our synagogue house, where it was thoroughly enjoyed by the members of the congregation and the community,"
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 ...
[Liz] now aims to convey emotion rather than realism. Her abstract figures often have featureless faces, and she avoids rendering too many details, preferring to let poses and gestures lend her work its emotive quality, which she doesn’t attempt to define.
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.
“I don’t want to face a white canvas. Sometimes I just pour color on.”
Abstraction can push a familiar scene to the limit of recognizability.
This artist's quiet authority is apparent both in person and in her work.
The figures are emotionally loaded. It's not, however, facial expressions that carry the emotion but their postures and placement in space.
[Her figurate paintings] depict models in a modern and somewhat surreal way, allowing the viewer to add any features to the blank areas of the faces in her paintings.
It was an emotional experience for me. ... I just was completely floored by (Gribin’s) work.