Artist Karin Siba offers sensual, deeply resonant images – landscapes, the female face – all are vivid with color, and alive within and through layers. This deeply resonating work feels immediate, vital, and elegaic at the same time. It takes a vivid moment and captures that moment’s emotion.
Skiba says her work reflects an ongoing process of art, one that “evolves as I do, involving layering metaphor and imagery much like all of contemporary life. It changes and flexes and reflects what I am experiencing as an artist in the world. It is my interpretation of the life I am living. “
She says “I love fashion photography and it inspires me to make my own fictional portraits of women. Sometimes I use a photo as a base to do a drawing that turns into a mixed media work. The result is a surprise to me depending on how the work grows and changes under my brush and scissors.” According to the artist “Using a variety of material – old paintings and drawings, magazine clippings, photos – all make for a rich collage of color and shape. I think fashion is an art form in itself and a great resource of information.”
“My ‘ecofictional’ landscapes and trees come from my experience with nature, and they usually involve my own photos layered in to give different realities to the finished work. Architecture is fascinating and makes its way into the work as well,” Skiba explains, adding that photographing areas that have meaning for her and including them in her work adds yet another dimension.
Each of her works truly grabs the viewer with color, motion, and with its range of material, all of which fits together like the cohesive pieces of a glowing puzzle: photography, prints, painting, drawing.
She frequently depicts female faces in both her mixed-media work and paintings. To the viewer, her images are both beautiful and mysterious; these faces are lovely yet internal; dream-like.
Many of her paintings feature shades of the color blue taking the place of skin tones. This feels very natural even graceful, and adds to an aura both alluring and enigmatic.
“I have an instinctual way of working with color. For quite a few years now, I reach for blue to begin a work. It is comforting to me visually and works well with other colors,” she explains. “I love color in general and playing it against itself or a pure white background. I have a strong design background and making beautiful combinations of color is a natural.”
This intrinsic sense of color has shaped her work regardless of format throughout her work as an artist. In fact, the progression in her art over time has been reflected more in medium than in meaning, Skiba asserts.
“When I had a retrospective four years ago, I had no idea if the work from all those years would be cohesive,” she laughs. “But when we installed all the pieces covering 40 years, it was great. My style and color sense flowed! My work has changed in format, since I began with soft sculpture I dyed and sewed, then went on to cut out painted wood pieces. These went on to include words, then writing into the paint, then a switch to colored pencil then back to painting.”
As to her attraction to photographic images, she says “Photography has been present for many years in my art. I finally realized my father influenced me in a large way. He was a professional photographer and my favorite memories are watching him work in his darkroom.” She remarks that “Photos inspire me, and I am inspired by my own photos as well. So you will see some reference to photography as a medium on the pieces. Now I am obsessed with paper. Painting on it and cutting it, layering it, is what I am working with.”
Texture is certainly a strong part of all her work; her use of different textures and overlapping images shapes the experience of her art.
Artist Karin Skiba, above
Having made a move to the high desert also affects her work – its colors, style, and space. She reports that “Living in Joshua Tree has given me the chance to have more time in a great private studio space. That in itself is giving me freedom to explore more than ever. The art community is lively and I associate with artists more easily since we are all in a reachable area. You can really see here, it is not smoggy, there is a big sky. It seems to open you up to yourself.”
That openness is also visible in her work, which seems ever more expansive, in terms of both subject and approach.
For an upcoming solo show, HABITAT, her works involve “the concept of habitat or environs, whether residential or emotional. I am planning on using work I have created about Detroit, my home town, that illustrates photos I took there of downtown religious and residential architecture,” Skiba says. “Ohter work reflects the desert and the symboloism it generates.”
The exhibition will include collages that mix with watercolor and drawing. It opens November 2nd at the historic 29 Palms Art Gallery, originally an adobe home built for Western pulp fiction author Tom Hopkins, located at the Oasis of Mara in Twentynine Palms, next to the Joshua Tree National Park Headquarters. Well worth a drive: enjoy the desert landscape and the internal landscapes of Skiba’s art.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by Karin Skiba