Fran Lightman Gibson

Artist's Statement

"IF YOU NEED A PLACE TO GO, TAKE ANY ROAD."
- Fran L. Gibson

I think we all see the world a little differently and feel our own experience uniquely.  I paint using what all of my senses have given to me as the experience.  When I paint the sky, I am feeling the wind, putting it to music in my head, remembering the smell of the chance of rain, tasting the air, seeing the clouds dance.  Some skies reveal the swirl of life’s emotions that can be found in the movement of the clouds, ranging from fear to hope, foreboding to resolve, trepidation to acceptance…a sky that is still and silent but portending a change that will send it racing with a ferocity toward you as it begs you watch, stop, and not be afraid. 

Take any road encourages the viewer to have the confidence to experience life no matter how difficult or confusing. All of this exists with an underlying structure of assumptions.

"At the still point, there the dance is.”
- T. S. Eliot

I paint emotions and stories, often blooming in bursts and dashes of color.  My landscapes are built up of layers into rhythmic cadences with dissonance, complexity, and suggestion, through a painterly surface tension that resolves into a lyrical narrative.  Poetry, not prose.  I use loose and free brush marks in my work to show the dramatic light and energy that both represent and define the questions and optimism of life.  I infuse my feelings of joy, playfulness, empathy, and hope into the story, a composition that responds to the mood and tempo of a place.  My paintings are purposely not detailed, leaving the viewer to feel enough to complete the images based on his or her own sense of belonging.

My paintings are a carpe diem. They emphasize the shortness of life, an exploration that is drawn and redrawn. They suggest that one should be somewhere, whether in memory or desire, and live it to the fullest. The visual has transitions and movement like the patterns in music, the wailing of a ballad, the arrangements of improvisational jazz pieces, the complex drum rhythms in Celtic music, the syncopation and drone of an Apache Tatanka Song, or the wildness of late Beethoven Piano Sonatas.