|
Lois Giffen moved to the Florida Keys in 1988,
following almost thirty years of living and working
overseas. She loves the light and color here, and
hopes to stay forever.
The impulse to paint surfaced strongly at the age of
eleven when she got her first pair of glasses and
realized what she had been missing. She began
painting in oils at twelve. Her first teacher was
a portrait painter, and she served her apprenticeship by
painting "ancestral portraits" from tintypes, in which
she did a roaring trade throughout high school.
Her first blue ribbon was for a portrait of her
grandfather, painted when she was fifteen.
She had been a plein air painter for forty years
before she turned to sculpture, and has always been
inspired by the light and movement of the natural world.
At present, she is happiest working in welded steel,
which allows her to fuse her love of color with
three-dimensional form. Her works express balance,
serenity, playfulness and joy. She believes that
inspiration is never so pure as when it springs from the
creative child within us. The whole purpose of
artistic mastery is to allow that child to play.
Lois graduated from the University of Chicago in
1951, and spent a further three years in the graduate
study of art history and practice with emphasis on old
master techniques. She sharpened her drawing
skills with life studies at the Chicago Art Institute.
later she studied sculpture at the Amersham College of
Art in England. Her welding is done at the Florida
Keys Community College.
Her work is collected worldwide, and she has had solo
exhibitions in Benghazi, Libya; Tripoli, Libya;,
Sale, Australia; Kota Kinabalu, East Malaysia; Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia; and London, England. Here in the
Keys her work has been featured in a sculpture garden at
The Studios of Key West, and in a two-person show with
Martin Groffman at the Florida Keys Community College.
She has shown her work in numerous group shows, and at
Sculpture Key West.
Lois is a member of Artists in Paradise Gallery on
Big Pine Key, and of the Lower Keys Artists Network.
She serves on the Advisory Board of the Florida Keys
Council of the Arts. She lives in Marathon.
Further information is available from Who's Who in
America.
Click on the images to
view them in full size. |
