Elizabeth (Ibby) T. Greer
Biography

Select works from:
Shapes & Shadows
September 10-October 4
Photos from the reception
See also: B. Millner

Artist's Statement

     I drew my way through childhood with colored pencils and the biggest boxes of crayons. I took one basic art class in seventh grade and one more in high school in 1967.

     I wanted to take a drawing class at Hollins College as a freshman but was not permitted to, told by a new, young instructor that I “had no portfolio.” I gave art classes no further thought, and turned, instead, to writing as my means of creative expression. And, although I have visited many of the finest art museums in the country and in Europe and have my favorite painters (Hopper, O’Keeffe, Matisse, Breugel, Braque, Vermeer, Chagall, among others), it had never occurred to me to paint, in any medium, until I had read “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron in the summer of 1999.

     Cameron, apparently, asked just the right questions about artistic inclinations and I found myself signing up for beginning oil painting classes, from Anne Way Bernard, at her studio near Boones Mill. I began to paint for the first time in the Fall of 1999. My very first painting was a copy, from a reproduction in an art book, of a Henri Matisse still life of a dresser. The reproduction in the book made everything look blue, so that is how I painted it. I have since seen another reproduction that shows everything as green. No matter. I learned how to paint. From that first copy, my teacher walked me through techniques and materials until I settled in on what I call “shapes and shadows.”

     The bright colors and shapes of everyday objects, like plates and cups and coffee pots, forks, and salt shakers and pitchers of cream, have become my passion. It is not the “thing” itself, the particular object, that catches my interest, but how that object can be portrayed, usually with its accompanying shadow(s), so that shadow becomes as “real” as the object, and both can be painted so that the design captures the moods, humor, relationships of the parts, and the dignity of the whole.

     My latest works, thanks to a scanner and laser printer that allow me to change the photograph I work from, take me into the heart of a simple still life. I zoom in past the handle of a coffee pot so that the viewer is in an interior, where a small piece of toast may loom like a wall, or the many shades of white can be explored through the lens of a glass saltshaker. Shapes and shadows have equal weight in my work. I may never paint a face, a landscape, or a flower, but coming into art as late in my life as I have, I know what intrigues me.

Elizabeth (Ibby) T. Greer, 2002

*all work copyright the artist