ARTISTGisela Rabdau
If anything is true about me is that I am always learning. I experiment. I make mistakes. I try to figure out how a new medium fits with the feeling I want to convey. Except watercolors. I hate painting with watercolors.
Gisela Rabdau reinvented herself at the age of 50. After working as a chef for 20 years and raising a family, she picked up a camera and a paintbrush to explore her familiar surroundings in a new way. She developed her style under the teaching of Bill Moralez at Canada College and Ann Turner at Skyline College, and by making more mistakes than one would think possible. She is originally from Düsseldorf, Germany, but has called the Bay Area home since 1966. She routinely shows her photographs, paintings and prints throughout the peninsula.
I love the smell of oil paint and turpentine. I love how oils frees me from conventional representations and lets me paint outside of the boundaries, if I choose to. Oil allows for reinvention and evolution of an idea. In Strawberries Fields Forever, for example, it actually started as an abstract until I decided to strip down and change it. I wanted to convey a tension between optimism and the intention to cut that optimism down.
I want to communicate with the person who is looking at my art, and I hope that my art is a conversation between me and the observer. I hope that this work takes something familiar and makes it feels different and makes the observer ask questions.