Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Brigitte Balbinot has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.
Brigitte is an award-winning artist based in Florida, USA. Brigitte was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 17th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified her art to be showcased in this feature.
Brigitte’s Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to over 350+ major news outlets, with inclusion on Google News & Bing News. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting her artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.
Below are Brigitte’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 images that were submitted to this competition.
Artist Biography
Contemporary landscape artist Brigitte Balbinot grew up Switzerland. She is a full time practicing artist who now works and lives in South Florida. Having both a Swiss and Italian heritage, her solid footprint in the old continent can be observed in her work. While predominantly nature inspired, her paintings are driven by a sense of place while alluding to the nostalgia of time passed and life's impermanence. Each year, the artist spends time in her native country of Switzerland as well as in a small medieval village situated in the northern part of Italy. Being immersed in the Italian culture and regional landscape has influenced her work over the years, and is particularly evident in her most recent body of work titled "Strutura". These works not only reflect her passion for the Northern Italian landscape but also her love of ancient medieval villages and antique structures. In fact, Balbinot spends a great deal of her time researching and visiting ancient castles and old manors. Her work can be seen as a mixture of modernism and traditionalism, carrying a certain "European" flair and sophistication. With each painting, she aims at creating an object that is either tied to a place or to a memory. More recently, Balbinot has been introducing framing on some of her works, carefully choosing styles that reflect her thinking and reflection on the passage of time, thereby creating a highly orchestrated symbioses of old and new.
Balbinot works with different mediums such as oil, both cold and hot wax also known as encaustic, a medium dating back to the Greco Romans, which requires the use of a blowtorch to fuse each layer application. Her process is complex and requires many months to reach completion. Techniques such as solvent reduction, the use of organic materials and aggregates such as dry pigments or marble dust that are mixed directly to the paint allow her to create rich and vibrant patinas of both textures and colors. The crafting of these intricate and complex surfaces emphasizes the physicality of the material. Balbinot is self-taught. Over the years, she has been perfecting her skills via numerous workshops, classes and mentorships, which has resulted in an ongoing progression of her work. She has collaborated on residential and commercial commissions in Canada and in the United States and has collectors in both North America and Europe. Currently the artist shows her work in regional galleries and selected curated exhibits. For the past few years, Balbinot has been dividing her time between her main studio in Florida and a second studio located in Montréal Québec, while also spending time in Europe yearly.
Artist Statement
The act of painting is my way of expressing how I feel about the world around me. Inspiration may take many forms, from the elements found in nature, topography, the landscape to the study of antiquity and classical art. I am drawn to weathered surfaces and the history they hold. I see my work as a reference to the nostalgia of time passed and a reflection on the impermanence of life. Nothing is meant to last, but there is true beauty in the imperfect and the universal laws that govern all things. My most recent works reveal the influence of the Italian landscape, its countryside and medieval architecture. Organic substances like oils, wax, dry pigments and marble dust are among my favorites. My process is extremely labor intensive and driven by the physicality of the materials. I typically work in series and will generally have many paintings going at once. Just as in life, art offers no shortcut and each piece goes through many transformative stages over the course of multiple months before it finally unfolds. Each one of my paintings is meant to carry its own history. I aim to create an object that represents the symbioses of old and new. By combining the modernism of abstracted forms and the traditionalism of carefully calibrated chosen colors and frames on selected works, I allude to the passage of time while being in the present.
Brigitte’s website is www.brigittebalbinot.com.
