Bobbie McKibbin
"I grew up in Philadelphia where my father worked as a photo-retoucher for the Philadelphia Enquirer and my mother was a housewife. As a child I loved to draw and hours would dissolve into minutes as I invented my visual worlds. One day my father gave me an astounding present – a beautiful set of soft pastels contained in a wonderful wood box. I was immediately entranced by the array of rich, dense colors.
My work originates from my love for drawing. I still work with beautiful soft pastels – I enjoy the feel of the pastel on my fingers as it moves across the surface of the page. I appreciate how it can be manipulated – it is one of the most direct and simple materials an artist can employ.
I try to bring about a sense of balance and harmony in my image making and to faithfully record a sense of place without sacrificing the overall integrity of the image. My mark making leaves a record of my activity and search. Light, time and atmospheric conditions are very important elements and viewing my work from various distances affects the interpretation and response considerably. From across a gallery light, atmosphere, and overall design dominate. At a much closer range, the handwriting and personal short hand take center stage. It is my hope that as a result of studying my images, you will view your world with a keener and sharper vision.
Growing up in the city my sensibilities were decidedly urban. In college I focused almost entirely on non-objective images as I learned the art of printmaking. As a young printmaker I was influenced by the work of the Abstract Expressionists. I strove in my color intaglios for the same strong, sure and personal mark making and gesture that I admired in the works of William DeKooning, Franz Kline and Estaban Vicente.
A move to Iowa in the mid-seventies to teach at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts college, dramatically changed my work’s direction. I was captivated by the space, light, patterns and vastness of the plains–realism had to be explored – it was impossible not to engage with the landscape. Two painters who greatly influenced my early landscapes were Richard Diebenkorn and Edward Hopper. Each artist beautifully combined abstraction and figurative elements in their compositions. Working plein air in pastel and paint, I embraced documenting the world in which I lived. The grain elevators, corn and soybean fields and streets of Grinnell all vied for my attention. The demands and immediacy of working on site produced a shorthand that was direct, austere, and elemental. I wanted each drawing to be a sensitive portrait faithfully representing a particular place and time. This quest of faithful depiction, emphasizing time, place, and atmosphere continues today.
I recently left full-time teaching in 2007 and now have as much time as I want to spend in my studio. After many years of travel to the west I now live in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. My work is shaped by living and working in the west and by an immersion in the works of writers such as Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, and William Kittredge and many others. I see myself as a kind of reporter, someone who documents, a witness to the mystery and beauty that surrounds us. My work faithfully records a sense of place and at the same time celebrates the act of drawing and image making.
Capturing and transporting the viewer’s attention underscores the value of place. I love to be an “eye” and I love pastel – I slide open a drawer of chalk and I am transported. Blues and violets become the Bitterroot Range, mountains which slowed the Corp of Discovery. Through my myopic eyes, light passes through new high tech, implanted lenses flooding tattered, torn, repaired retinas only to be transformed into the idea of mountain and farm." - Bobbie McKibbin
SOURCE - https://bobbiemckibbin.com/artist-statement/ (Oct 2025)
