Spiritual Artist Joanna Gabler Exhibits Minatures in Brattleboro
Williamstown painter turns to small scale
By: Michael Miller - Aug 21, 2007
Joanna has a deep and intimate relationship with color and its healing qualities. Her involvement with the world of color and art started in mid eighties when she began working with watercolor and pastels, followed by a series of art classes and the exploration of various media from stain glass to painting on silk. For the past 13 years she has worked primarily with oil on canvas. Her deep experience of color forms a bridge between her two fields of interest as a painter: spiritual life and nature. Recently she has turned to subjects which embody the drama of events in the spiritual world, like "St. Michael and the Dragon," "Anatomy of the Soul," and "The Creation."
Inspired by inner experiences, Joanna's abstractions and semi-abstractions show a seemingly limitless variety of different colors and forms, which grow organically, one from another. In these paintings she explores themes which have concerned her since she was a student of philosophy at the University of Warsaw in the late 1970's: the mystery of the World and Nature, particularly the elements, the seasons, the spiritual forces in nature and man's relation to them.
Joanna first began to paint in watercolor in mid 1980's, when she was an assistant professor of philosophy and sociology at the Akademia Podlaska in Siedlce near Warsaw. Shortly before she emigrated to the United States, she turned to pastels. In New York she pursued studies in drawing, painting, and glass work, and other media at FIT, Pratt Urban Glass Center and New York Art League, while working on Wall Street as an Information Specialist/Corporate Librarian. Since 1994 she has worked primarily in oil on canvas. Joanna moved in the summer of 2002 to the northern Berkshires from New York, her home since her arrival in America.
Joanna Gabler has held numerous solo exhibitions in New England and New York City. Currently her more typical works executed on a larger scale can be seen at North Adams Regional Hospital (as part of the North Adams Community Artwork Project, open freely to the public: see our report), in the Latchis Hotel in Brattleboro, and at Hebert Realty in Great Barrington. Her paintings have been purchased by numerous private and institutional collections in the United States and Europe.
Joanna is also an art therapist. In this capacity she has developed a unique approach to meditation through art and color, guiding workshops for the Women's House of Peace in North Adams and other local groups.