Claire Libin

"Libin focuses on specific floral species, red Alliums and Bell flowers, rendering these in exquisite detail. Her yen for verisimilitude, however, doesn't compromise the work's inherent abstraction. Backgrounds, delineated by strate-like bands resemblng sky or land formations, morph into suggestive worlds, microcosms of unbounded space,enchanted gardens." from an essay by Douglas Dreishpoon , Senior Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Claire Libin was born and raised in Manhattan, New York. She moved to Taos in 1995 and has lived and worked there since. The subject of her oil paintings are botanical portraits that explore themes of growth, death, decay and renewal. With their distressed, abraded surfaces, the paintings' physicality further emphasize her thematic concerns.

The delights of the garden and all its attendant pleasures--dirt on the hands, the smell of pinched mint and the first poppy blossom--share an uncanny resemblance to the visceral delights of painting. The smell of oil, the near sexual joy in squeezing paint and the satisfaction of a wet brush on canvas. Both gardening and painting also carry a sense of mystery: What blooms on the canvas is usually as surprising as the color of the tulips when they finally show their heads.

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