Gwendolyn Holbrow - Artistic Training, Development and Philosophy

Artistic Training, Development and Philosophy

Holbrow first studied commercial art in the mid-1980s, at the Madison Area Technical College in Madison, WI, but it would be some time before her creative focus turned strongly to art. In 1989, she and her husband moved their family to Frankfurt, Germany, and while there, Holbrow did professional graphic-arts work, received classical voice training, and involved herself in the local choral and opera community. During a visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 1998, Holbrow realized Von Gogh's student art was as primitive and problematic, as the paintings on which she was then laboring; perhaps hers held some promise as well. Her serious study of fine art began at this point. Returning to America in 1998, Holbrow earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art in 2001 from Framingham State College in Massachusetts, and soon after started teaching art herself at the Danforth Museum.

Holbrow’s training reflects her quirky willingness to tackle a vast variety of media, subjects and issues: she lists auto-body training along with more conventional pursuits such as stone carving on her vitae.

Holbrow says her overarching motivation as an artist is “making people pay attention”: experientially as with It Was Here, or to social/political issues as with her extensive forays into Barbie art, which have won her frequent acclaim. Holbrow’s take on the way Barbie, personifying women in America, is idealized in order to be vilified: “Barbie is our shadow and you have to embrace your shadow.” In her artist’s statement accompanying Speech Balloons, a body of work that seeks to manifest communication in tangible form, Holbrow wrote: “My task as an artist is to serve as channel between the seen and unseen worlds, facilitating the flow, and creating or revealing connections which nourish the inner lives of individuals and the community.”