Gwen Fabert Maitzen knew since she was 6 years old that she wanted to be an artist. In high school, she almost went down the classical bassoonist road but found her way back to visual arts after spending a summer in Italy as an exchange student. It was there that Fabert Maitzen discovered the power and beauty of art. Making art remains her lifelong pursuit.
She obtained a BA in painting from DePauw University; studied with artist Nell Blaine in New York City and took classes at the Art Students League. She then received her MSEd from Northern Illinois University and a MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. She has had numerous exhibits throughout the Midwest. Her work is in collections in England and throughout the United States.
Fabert Maitzen has taught since 1984 including high school art, university courses, elderhostels and summer camps. She has been an artist-in-residence at Northern Illinois University. Teaching keeps Fabert Maitzen current and inspired. After twenty years, she still enjoys helping students of all ages discover and rediscover the joy of drawing and painting.
She and her photographer husband, Chris Maitzen, owner of A True Likeness Photography, recently remodeled their forty year old dairy barn into the Studio Barn, a painting and photographic studio located in the heart of Oregon, Wisconsin. Here on nine acres, with her daughter and husband, Fabert Maitzen makes art, teaches, spins and dyes mohair, gardens and helps care for a host of chickens and angora goats.
The work represented is a small sample of sixteen years of exploring the shape of the circle. All of my training and explorations finally led to this deceptively simple shape. My artwork is not only about image/product but is also about process and concept.
I was taught in a late 19th century manner of painting where every stroke was as expressive as it was decisive, capturing the essence of the person or place in that single stroke. In the 1980's, landscapes dominated my focus. Painting numerous works in oil and drawing in pastel, I learned to blend color, value and how to manipulate texture. I learned to make beautiful images. Increasingly, however, compositionally, the abstract and geometric underlying structure became more important than the image. I began to explore the potential of the concept in relationship to the image, leaving realism to the sketchbook or personal enjoyment.
I deconstructed my education and began to research alternative approaches to paint application that coincided with my developing voice. Now I am able to translate that same landscape or figure into a more conceptual approach searching and revealing the essence of the place or person using the mark making tools with clarity through the layering of paint, objects, digital imagery and poetry and anything else that might be of interest or simply handy. I take a Renaissance painting technique of using layers of color, so that their interaction makes for intensity of color and of texture, and apply them to 20th - 21st century concepts.
My approach to art making allows me to explore a variety of mediums connecting ideas with a valued liberal arts education. Conceptually, the circle is associated with a vast array of subjects. From what our ancestors looked to in the sky, to the substructures that need microscopes to see; mathematical relationships of pi to irrational numbers; the zero which, when paired with numeral one, create the binary code, a most contemporary cultural distinction; creating a portrait without the facial recognition, but rather the interior spaces; and understanding that in human development, a young child explores the joy of mark making with a crayon, the scribble finally closes to from a circle and the abstract symbol making begins and so opens up language, thought and communication, just as the first humans made their marks of art on cave walls.
Circles connect, are infinite, are colossal, are undetectable, contain life, and are descriptive and mysterious. Circles are found in civilizations across history and in all cultures. Within the circle there are endless possibilities of exploration and discovery. I have found great joy and challenge in this particular pursuit of art making. It keeps me always close to why art is made; for the joy of the process, the challenge of the concept and the manifestation of the image or object that realizes the idea.
~ Gwen Fabert Maitzen ~
