The Maybe People
October 16, 2008
By Mike Landry
Jude Griebel's "Vacant Room, Seated Figure."
Drawing inspiration from children’s books and folk tales, Vancouver-based painter Jude Griebel has become a modern day Geppetto turning material into people’s portraits. Griebel crafts implied bodies of his subjects using domestic objects from his subject’s lives, such as scraps of clothes, furniture and other domestic material.
Griebel has been working figuratively in his work for the past five years dealing with themes of alienation, isolation and the imagination. His latest work has him making the whole piece figurative, turning his subjects into scarecrow like forms.
“By using pieces of these people’s personal symbols and arranging them it often stands in for them without the flesh,” says Griebel. “It’s these traces of these people, and it could almost be them. Often it seems more real, and carries more information about them, than an actual conventional painted portrait.”
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October 16, 2008 at 10:26 am
Great overview of Jude’s current exhibition! This is a wonderful show, I hope everyone will come see it in person, or at the very least on Bau-Xi’s website (bau-xi.com). The gingerbread man and woman “Doomed Lovers” is my absolute favourite.