BUFFY CRIBBS BIO

Born, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1953.

Big events in my life start with moving to Claremont, California when I was nine years old. My mother took myself and my four brothers and sisters there when she enrolled in the Graduate School as a Yeats and Joyce scholar. She was much older than most of the other students who, in turn, were much older than us children. Somehow it all worked to where she was the big Mama and there was one big brawl of students and professors and kids in a constant soup of life in our rented Victorian house. Mom was drawn to the art departments of the various colleges and as we tagged along we were introduced to bronze casting at Pomona College, Life drawing and printing at Scripps.

I spent all of my spare time in the Company of one Eric Volrath who was an MFA student and a wino. He had been at Otis as an entymologist so we captured tarantulas and scorpions, smoked pipes and rollies, took long walks in the wash looking for "found objects" for sculptures, hunted lizards, and talked about existentialists. We made waxes in his kitchen; the stove was black with the stuff, and cast them at the foundry at Pomona. Eric was the one who took a live lizard and pressed it into soft ground on an etching plate and made one of the most vibrant "alive" prints I have ever seen.

Then we moved to Ireland.

I was thirteen. Mom enrolled us in The Sligo Grammar and High School where I proceeded to obtain a classic education; Latin, Greek, English, history, geography, science and math. All in very big mouthfuls. As the years passed and passions went from ponies and and the Beatles back again towards the Arts, I met and mingled with most of the Shining lights of the Dublin Art Scene. Eventually I was invited, at the age of eighteen, to participate in The Irish Exhibition of Living Art which was (and is still) an Annual National invitational.

Soon thereafter I went to Paris to Aupair for the family of Micheal Farrell who was at that time Ireland's leading Painter. We all lived in a place called "La Rouche" which means the bee hive. It was built by Eiffel as the cheese and wine exhibition hall for the 1906 World Fair and was a-buzz with artists from all over the world working away in studios shaped like pieces of pie.

I met and developed a huge crush on a man named Marc Brusse, who was a Dutch Conceptualist. He hired me as "La petite charpentiere" and I constructed editions of sculpture for him in the yard in front of La Rouche. I was very drawn to conceptual art and the thoughtfulness of it tied very nicely into my haberdashery life so strewn with seemingly unconnected experience which, nevertheless, seemed to add up to some kind of whole.

Of course I also saw the impressionists, who's paintings melted me ..... and the Cluny which is a museum of the middle ages and is full of armor and iron maidens and torture devices as well as wonderful tapestries and furniture and reliquaries.

I think if you look at my work you can see all of this there. In so much as one is the sum of one's experience, one's art is likely to be that also. I believe that good art resonates with some innate truth. This is a quality which is essential to meaningful art; the successful handing over of an idea from one being to the next. I feel at one with my Art, not so much because I can sell it as because it moves other people and it entertains and amuses me.

As far as how I produce my art ... I have a VERY well equipped shop full of wood and metal working tools. My studio is well lit and I have a huge and diverse selection of music. I have learned to make tools and hardware and to paint backwards.

Gallery Contacts

Rob Shouten Gallery
765 Wonn Road #C-103
Greenbank, WA, 98253
360/222-3070
800/858-5063

robschoutengallery.com

Visit Flicker Feather Press, flickerfeatherpress.com, a fully equipped art press, adjacent to our home and studies.

It features a 60 x 30 Takash etching press, accompanied by a rosin aquatint box, commercial hot plate, downdraft table and expansive glass topped work stations.

The Flicker Feather press is suitable for intaglio, block printing and mono printing.

In the spring and fall we give hands on workshops on various printing techniques.

The space can be rented by the day and can accommodate up to five people.