A personal journey into explorations of the self and the
world has always resonated in the work of Melinda Stickney-Gibson. As
she immerses herself in the process, she transmutes fury, joy, passion,
hope, and despair into her abstract, expressive imagery.
Her work is possessed by a remarkable vitality. Hovering between knowledge
and chaos, her paintings exude both strength and vulnerability. It is
impossible not to be struck by the numerous dualities that exist within
her sensibility: the anxious, sometimes even violent, gesture coexisting
with painterly passages evoking quietude and inviting contemplation;
the manner in which her iconography both analyzes the process and content
of painting and poeticizes it; the intensely personal nature of the
work. Her paintings invite the viewer to enter an archetypal space that
reverberates with the power of her own intuitive and primal experience.
Perhaps it is the encyclopedic way in which Stickney-Gibson intertwines
the duality of violence and serenity within each painting that provides
a convincing visual analogue for the abruptly different emotional moods,
creating an architecture that holds together the complex compositions.
As she works on many pieces at once in her upstate New York studio,
she moves from painting to painting, allowing them to communicate with
each other. One is aware of the influence of nature in these works;
at times they seem saturated with the shimmering light of dawn and at
other times appear to take on the murkiness of night. But one is never
unaware that each one is a record of an internal landscape reflecting
emotional states as well as natural ones.
As Eleanor Hartney states, “For Melinda Stickney-Gibson, painting
is like life - messy, full of accidents and underlain with semi-orderly
structures that bend and disintegrate under pressure of real life action.
Her lyrical paintings are not so much painted as allowed to evolve,
growing by accretion over periods of weeks or months (or at times, even
years), as loose brushstrokes are laid over looser grids, fields of
color laid down to partially obscure sketchy marks, and traces of covered
layers revealed by a subtle cut through the surface.”
Stickney-Gibson has had numerous exhibitions throughout the United States
since the mid 1980s, and her work is in the permanent collections of
scores of corporate collections including AT& T, Citicorp, Deloitte
and Touche, EMI Records, and United Airlines, among many others.
