Email: georgina.forbes@valley.net
Web: www.varoregistry.com/forbes
Primary medium: Acrylic on canvas
Forbes work is in the collection of the FLEMING MUSEUM, Burlington, VT., and
in collections at the Brookline Savings Bank, Brookline, MA, World Wide Business
Centers,Inc.,575 Madison Ave at 57th St, NYC, New England Life Insurance Company,
Boston, MA., Consolidated Group Trust, Framingham, MA, and the Boston Redevelopment
Authority, City Hall, Boston, MA., Mass Eye and Ear Hospital, Boston, MA, and
Pandick Press International, Boston MA. Her work is also in numerous private
collections, with a full list available.
Forbes has exhibited her work from 1972 to the present throughout the United
States and in Trinidad, in numerous solo and group shows. Her work has appeared
in Old House Interiors magazine, Woodstock Common Magazine, and been reviewed
in many newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Rutland
Herald, Valley News, Times Argus, and The Vermont Standard.
Born in Boston, MA., Forbes has traveled extensively in the US, Africa, the
Carribean, Central America, and Europe. She began painting in childhood, motivated
by a number of artists in her family, including her mother, grandmother and
several aunts. Her great uncle Abbott Thayer was a well known American artist
, and left a strong legacy in her mother's family. Her cousin Edward Forbes
was an accomplished painter and did important research on color pigments as
an early director of the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA. Georgina Forbes studied
with noted watercolorist Loring Coleman as a child, and later with the late
James Gahagan, director of the Hofmann School of Art in Provincetown, MA for
many years, and a teacher at Pratt Institute in New York City before he retreated
to Forbes' home state of Vermont, where he continued teaching at the Vermont
Studio Center in Johnson, VT.
She received a Master's degree in Counseling Psychology from Antioch University
in 1978, and went on to train and teach for seven years in The Institute of
Human Ecology Training program involving art, sound, movement and body work
in the process of personal growth and healing. She was in private practice for
many years, and also worked in community mental health. Always Forbes painted,
and her work has continually reflected the interface between her outward experience
with emotional and spiritual healing, and her inner process. The reality of
color fields as energetic vibrations, and their relationship to the creation
of reality, holds an endless fascination for Forbes. So too, the medium of water
plays a major role as both subject and source in Forbes' art.
Forbes' most dramatic work followed her travels to Nicaragua during the contra
war in the mid '80's. She created an interactive, installation sculpture, called
"The Peace Hunger Kitchen" with collaboration from others, and traveled
throughout the northeast for nearly two years, between 1986-1988, working with
over thirty events and locations, including television/media events, an installation
in the Rotunda of the US Senate., and an installation for several weeks outside
of the National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
Forbes states: " Through color, water, light, pattern and shape, I work
to integrate landscape images which are at once explicit, symbolic, and expressionistic.
These are unabashedly emotional paintings. Creation is, by nature, about transformation;
birth, and death. Painting is my way to explore the frontier where risk, intention
and conscious use of skill , lead to expressing light and elemental forces manifesting
spirit. Earth, air, fire, and water-these elemental forces are all powerful,
even as “civilization” puts all at risk. We are connected to all life,
and heir to the powerful truths that govern all beings. We are called to walk
through fertile darkness, to walk in light, to find healing, and to allow our
feeling selves to breathe consciousness into the acts of living that form our
lives on earth. "