Modern-day Monet at Morris Arboretum
Gordon Gibfried is seen with two of his paintings in the gallery at Morris Arboretum, in the Widener Visitors Center. (Photos by Marie Fowler)
by by MARIE FOWLER
Gordon Gibfried is a modern-day Monet, and his garden is the Morris Arboretum! Water, Trees and Sky, an exhibition of Gibfried’s landscapes created on the arboretum’s grounds, is on view in the Upper Gallery at the arboretum’s Widener Visitors Center through September 4.
“I’ve been painting here for 30 years,” says Gibfried, who still recalls his first visits while a student at the Philadelphia College of Art in the early 1970s. “We were living in the middle of the city,” Gibfried remembers. “There was no green. We’d take the A Local out here with paints and canvasses. This has been a sanctuary for me,” he continues, almost reverently.
Gibfried is at the arboretum every week and often on weekends. “I can sneak off to areas other people don’t know about, into the wetlands. I love wetlands, love painting water — it’s part of the land and part of the sky. The wind hits it and it moves. There’s an island you can sit on. There might be 1,600 people in the park and you never see them.”
A sort of artist-in-residence, Gibfried often works at sunrise. “It’s awesome,” he muses. “There’s not a soul here.”
Gibfried moved around the country a good deal when he was growing up. “I lived in Minnesota, in Ohio, in Connecticut.” He adored the mountains of New England, and, indeed, still paints there. “I’d climb around, up above the timberland, into the clouds.” Not surprisingly, Gibfried’s a hiker, having done parts of the Appalachian Trail.
The painter came to the area as a student at the Philadelphia College of Art in the early ’70s and “never left,” as he puts it. He literally got married to the girl next door — in the dorm, that is, and today she is an artist as well, painting portraits and writing and illustrating children’s books.
Gibfried introduced the couple’s three children to the outdoor life early on. “I carried my son on my back up the sides of Mount Washington. We’ve always canoed, hiked and fished. We still tent once in a while.
“And I’ve been wheeling them around here since they were babies,” Gibfried says, nodding toward the arboretum grounds.
Today, the Bala Cynwyd resident is primarily a landscape painter. “When I was a kid, I was a Surrealist, a Dadaist.” He even studied illustration at one point. “I enjoyed the idea at the time, but I am too much of a painter to have to work for other people.”
A quiet, reflective man, Gibfried becomes animated when he speaks about his work. “I don’t consider myself just a representational painter. I deal with color and light. It’s a real challenge, pushing the limits. Corot has a little painting at the Art Museum. It has air in it. You can breathe the air in it. I try to shoot for things like that.”
Gibfried indicates a composition including a pond cypress. “When you look from a distance, you see color and movement, but once you start getting closer, you can see another energy. It has a lot to do with the place.”
The hardy outdoorsman paints en plein air year-round — even in the rain, “if it’s not pouring,” Gibfried says, recounting an experience of working in the rain. “Everything seems to be more brilliant when it rains.
“I love seeing, just sitting and looking. I will look at a tree and look at its structure and see how a tree builds itself. Different trees do things different ways. Random organization within nature. I paint a tree the way I understand a tree grows.”
Arboretum hours are 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. on weekdays and from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. on weekends. The arboretum, part of the University of Pennsylvania, is located at 100 East Northwestern Ave., and may be reached at 215-247-5777.
More of Gibfried’s work can be seen on his Web site: www.gwgibfried.50megs.com.
