CHERYL GRIESBACH
Cheryl Griesbach received her BFA at the School of Visual Arts and has been on the faculty since 1985. For the past twenty-five years Cheryl has won numerous awards from the Society of Illustrators, worked for almost every publishing house in New York City, completing over 1,000 book jackets, as well as plate designs for Williams-Sonoma and award-winning cover art for the Village Voice.
Artist’s Statement
My technique of oil painting has derived from my knowledge and interest in the 17th and 18th century Flemish painting style that I originally pursued as a student at the School of Visual Arts, yet have continued to develop in my matured years. After graduating the School of Visual Arts, which I am currently a faculty member of, I began working as a commercial artist in 1974, but it wasn’t until the year 2000 that I finally discovered my primary influence in European botanicals, Dutch still life’s, and the influences of the American Hudson School artists. I wish to create theatrical compositions that set a specific mood and speak to the viewer as a sort of utopian art. My main objective is to use my varied influences and idealist painting techniques to devise imagery that would allow one to momentarily release themselves from our modern, technology polluted-world. My method includes looking at color, shape, form, as well as applying my own intuition and free association, than moving the elements around on the surface until the magic of the image appears. My work is often like a montage of animals, floras, still-life, landscapes, and bits of my own photography, all used in the purpose of resurrecting antiqued imagery in the hopes of building a new stage and a new reality that I believe proper to itself. While my muses and ingenuity have remained the same since I left art school, it nevertheless took me years to truly learn about artifice and illusion, and to arrive to my own mythology that art is the lie that tells the truth.