My Second Act as an Artist: Bibby Gignilliat

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching our video podcast, Radio Maine, which is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today I have with me Bibby Gignilliat, who is a very talented artist who hails from the West Coast and is represented by the Portland Art Gallery. Thanks for coming in today. Our tagline is celebrating and exploring creativity in the human spirit. That's what we do here on Radio Maine. Your background is so diverse and interesting, and you've explored and celebrated creativity in the human spirit in many different ways over the course of your life.

Bibby Gignilliat: I sure have. Would you like me to tell you about it?

Lisa Belisle: I am looking for the most interesting place to start, but for you, there's a lot of entry points. What's the most interesting thing that you think has brought you to where you are now?

Bibby Gignilliat: Well, I think it would be best to start with my childhood. When I was young, I loved to paint, and then I had a critical teacher and I stopped painting. So many people have had that experience where either a parent was critical or a teacher or a friend, and I stopped painting. And all these years later, I did everything from being a computer programmer to a bicycle tour leader. I worked in marketing at Williams Sonoma, and then I went to culinary school and I ran a cooking business for 20 years. All of those jobs required creativity, but the whole time I was doing all those things, I had this dream of having a gallery show. As Julia Cameron says in her book, The Artist's Way, if you really want to know what you should do in life, look at what you loved as a child.

So circling back to my childhood, it was painting. As I was running my company, I took a painting class in the building that I'm in, in Sausalito, California, and it's an old ship building building with about 180 working artists. One of the artists was teaching a class. I took this class and I was literally the worst one in the class. I really was. If I showed you my work, you would say, yes, you were the worst one in the class. But I have determination, if you haven't noticed. So I got a space in the building. I felt like an imposter. I didn't even want to leave my studio, but I kept working at it. And here I am today, 10 years later, I'm so honored and thrilled to be in the Portland Art Gallery.

Lisa Belisle: First of all, I want to take a step back, and I told you this yesterday because we were at a breakfast in Portland with a group. Not only have you gone back and reintegrated your own self as an artist, but as an educator, I've taken advantage of one of your classes online and you have a very gentle vibe about yourself as an educator, but also this is what we're going to do. Do you feel like you've gone back and reclaimed that space where you were criticized early on? Now that you have taught cooking for 20 years and now you're teaching art, are you doing it in a specific way so that you help people feel welcomed into the space?

Bibby Gignilliat: I have this sign up in my building by Brene Brown, and it's a great quote. The gist of it is that everybody is creative. It's just a matter of how you express it. Some people might be a cook, someone else might be a musician, maybe a coder. There's creativity in everything. And it's great when people figure out what their creative jam is and then can explore it. I'm really encouraging in my classes. I want to be the antithesis of that teacher that shut down my little spirit at age 10.

Lisa Belisle: That's always my favorite thing about working with people who are truly good teachers, is that I see that there's an encouraging that takes place and an openness. Obviously you have to have a sense of direction because there might be some content, but I've never really seen the point of causing people to feel upset or ashamed or criticized, because that becomes the thing that you remember for years and decades. And it can actually change the course of your life.

Bibby Gignilliat: Oh, totally. There's so many people that come to my class. I teach in my studio as well as online. At the end of studio classes, we'll go around and we'll do an introduction after I've said my story. So many people will have a similar story, and sometimes people even cry because it's like a homecoming for them to be in the class. I really like to create a safe space for them to explore that. And this, I think you'll find interesting. When I was getting ready to leave Williams Sonoma and get into teaching cooking, I taught cooking for many years, I was asked at one of the cooking schools I was teaching at to do this Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator test, and we figured out what our Myers-Briggs was. I have a really unusual Myers-Briggs, so very few people have my Myers-Briggs, only 9% of the population. So I needed to flex my personality to capture everyone in the room, and that's how I learned how to teach so that people that are really different from me can learn from me if I change the way I say things. So I'll give you an example.

My personality type wants to be the best it can be. I'm also really cool with a little of this, a little of that in cooking or in painting, but there's another personality type that needs to have it exact. So I would walk up to someone when I was teaching cooking, and they would say, how much salt should I add? How long should this cook? They need to know exactly. And I'm more of a little of this, a little of that. So when I teach, I had to give more detail for those kind of people.

Lisa Belisle: Do you mind me asking what personality type you are?

Bibby Gignilliat: I'm an E for extrovert, N for intuitive, F for feeler, and then P borderline J.

Lisa Belisle: I love what you're describing. And I know my personality type is, at least at one point in my life, I was an INFJ. I also think it's interesting because I've taken this more than once, and it shifts slightly. That's that borderline thing that you're talking about.

Bibby Gignilliat: Yes. As we grow, we've had to learn to flex our personalities to get along in the world. When I worked at Williams Sonoma, I would get intuitive hits on what I thought should be done, and I'd go and talk to my boss and she would say, well, where's the data? So even though in the end what I thought in the beginning would happen, she needed the data, understandably so. Does that make sense?

Lisa Belisle: It sure does. And I think about so much of, even though you and I are not the exact same personality type, there's a lot of that intuitive side of things, that when you work with people, that's just not the way they experience the world. You're absolutely right. You have to find a way to meet them and to join them, often rather than the other way around. I think people who have that intuitive side, it's just this inexplicable thing that is there. Whereas people who don't have that, they're like, exactly, where's the data? We need to have this in a really concrete way. And so I also see that in your art, and I know you talk about that in your art, is trusting your intuition as to how to move a piece forward. So tell me about that. How did you choose the type of art that you do now? And then tell me about how you collect all the things to come together to create the piece that is in front of you.

Bibby Gignilliat: When I took that initial class, and it was with Nick Wilton, he had a lot of design principles in the class that I wasn't quite grasping. His method, he wanted you to think of the design right at the get go. And that wasn't quite what I wanted to do. I think I needed to let the design unfold. So planning in advance, that would mean I was a planner as opposed to letting it unfold. And then what I realized about six months later is I found a collage teacher named Michael Klip, and I realized I needed to paint with paper. So then it all started coming together for me. When I create a piece, I often create the texture first, and the texture kind of represents for me the subconscious and conscious. So it's like what we can see versus what we can't see. And it's sort of like an archeological dig in my pieces. And then I come in with a design, and I like collecting scraps. I was a scavenger as a young child, and I could even say I was a bit of a garbage picker, and my mom hated it.

I would bring all this stuff home, and she's like, throw that out, it's dirty. But I was fascinated by things that I would find on my way home, and it has continued into my life now. So when I travel, I often find these incredible billboards that are either on the ground, which I found this big pile in New York that was on the ground, or I see them on a wall and I'll go tear them down. I'll never forget when I was running my company one day, it was raining, and I went to get a cup of coffee, and I found this, I had been painting at that point, I found this big mound of a billboard that had just fallen off, and it was huge. And I just picked it up and brought it back to the office, and it was soaking wet. And my whole staff looked at me and they were like, what are you doing?

But I still have those scraps. In fact, one of them is on one of the totems that's on the wall at the Portland Art Gallery this month. Now a lot of people know that I love collecting scraps and things. So they'll bring me stuff to my studio, and I just had to do a major cleanout. I had so many scraps, I had to clear some of them out to make room for new.

Lisa Belisle: In watching you teach this online class, I did love the layering. And then also there were times that you are actually pulling back the layering. So that's also really interesting to me, that you add things, but then you also subtract things.

Bibby Gignilliat: And that gets into, I'm a spiritual person, and that gets into my spiritual side, which is the non-attachment. So I put things down, and when I first started painting, I'd get attached to things and it would be really hard for me to let go. But now it's kind of a dance. I put down, I let go, I cover up, I bring it back, or bring something new in. And Michael Singer says in his book, The Untethered Soul, there's rocks in the river, and you can either grab onto the rocks or you can let go and let the flow go. And the whole point in art, for me, is to work on my non-attachment. And now I'm just trying to bring it into my real life, which is harder.

Lisa Belisle: Well, tell me about that. You can't bring that forward and then have me not ask about it.

Bibby Gignilliat: Well, I think sometimes we can want to be in control of everything. So it's learning to just let go and just trust that it's all going to work out. Whatever's supposed to work out will work out. I'm trying to think of an example. Yesterday I was nervous before my talk, and I kind of surrendered right before I gave it. I was at the gallery and I was talking for the opening, and I do something called offering. I just offered it and said, whatever's supposed to happen will happen, and it's bigger than me.

Lisa Belisle: I love that. And I think it is an interesting thing too, because when I think about my parents, and my father just passed away, my mom and my dad were so different in what they held onto and let go of. So I would end up with, I have now folders and folders of things that have been passed along to me. When you talk about putting those into a new form, bringing those into a new artistic form, but then also ultimately with your art, the point is you are doing your art, you collect these things, you put them into a piece, and then it goes out into the world and you don't really have control over who takes it with them. So I think that is actually really interesting and kind of difficult for a lot of people.

Bibby Gignilliat: My mom and dad, when they moved into senior living, they gave me boxes and boxes of stuff from old Time magazines and newspapers, and then all my own personal work from grade school and writing. And I love reading the stories. It connects me with my younger self. I did a whole series for a while there on putting these stories into my work. And people would say, aren't you making a copy of them? And I'd be like, no. I could have gone to Kinko's and made a copy. A lot of the students that come to my class bring love letters from their parents or whatever, and they will make copies and then bring them to class.

But I just let go of them and just moved on to the next thing. And it's out in the world somewhere. But it's a really lovely way to connect with your past. I have one piece that's the family wallpaper. My mom was really into wallpaper, and my aunt was an interior designer, and so my aunt was always redoing our house, and my mom was too. So there's all this wallpaper that I put into a painting, and it's sort of a homage to my growing up. And I'm like, that's the dining room, that's this room. And the piece that sold this weekend, it had wallpaper from my teenage room. The Mischief, that just sold a couple days ago, it had my teenage wallpaper in it. And there's something really powerful about that too, because then you're letting go of this physical thing, but it's still always been inside of you.

And one of my spiritual teachers talks about when you let go of stuff, you create room for something new to come in. So I'm all excited. I just let go of tons of papers in my studio and can't wait to see what new is coming in.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, that'll be really interesting to watch and see how your art evolves, because the new things that are coming in will probably show up there, I would imagine. So one of the things that I find really interesting about your work is that you bring in a lot of letters and words. So there's this very abstract and amorphous kind of thing going on, but then rising to the surface are these very physical elements of speech. And you bring these from Barcelona, Mexico City, New York City, and you're bringing in these ways that we all use to communicate with one another, and you're putting them into your pieces.

Bibby Gignilliat: Yes. I have a fascination with typography, and I was almost a math major, so I love numbers. So you'll see a lot of typography and numbers in my work, but one of my favorite things to do is to pick up scraps when I'm traveling. I have a great story. I was in Mexico City and I was in the Roman Norte district, and there was a building, it was a dilapidated building that was boarded up and had all these posters that were falling off. So I just tore them all down. I posted it on Instagram as I'm tearing them all down, and I rolled them all up and I put them in my bag, I left some clothes in Mexico just so I could bring them all back. And I created 15 pieces from that stash. And you guys have sold probably four or five of them, and one of the pieces is in the current show. But anyway, the funny story is I was at Open Studios and someone had seen that Instagram post, and this guy came in and said, hi, I'm with the Mexico City Police Department, and you're under arrest.

Lisa Belisle: That would've been very concerning if it was actually the case.

Bibby Gignilliat: Yes, exactly. And then I was telling someone the other day that I found this big pile of scraps in New York City, and I was with my friend, and she was sort of embarrassed, but I'm like, oh, wow, I want to take these home. So I found a box. It was just a bunch of litter on the street, but I found a box and put the scraps in the box. When I got to the hotel, I put them in the plastic laundry bag that they have in the hotel, and then I brought them home and I took them out of the bag and put them in my work bag, and I always cleaned them and everything. I washed them and put them on a little drying rack at my studio.

But I got home that night and there was a cigarette butt on my kitchen floor, and I was like, oh my God, someone's in my house, someone's been in my house. And then I realized it was from that stash.

Lisa Belisle: So you may be sometimes unintentionally carrying things along with you as part of your scavenging.

Bibby Gignilliat: Yes. There was also some coffee cups in there too.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I know that as the mother of several children, my husband and I have six between us, but I'm mostly talking about my children by birth. My son in particular, I would always have to look in his pockets because there was always stuff that he would leave in his pockets that he would pick up. He would forget. So I would find stuff at the bottom of the washing machine or the dryer rattling around.

And I think this also, my mother had the same thing. So I'm wondering if your mother also had this experience with young Bibby that was, oh, why are there rocks and sticks that are now coming out of your clothing?

Bibby Gignilliat: Yes. I think my mom did, and my mom's a neat freak, so I think it kind of bothered her. But anyway, now it's come into good use.

Lisa Belisle: Well, isn't that interesting too, because my mom also, just a wonderful, lovely lady, and she's also very neat, and she likes to have things just so, and as my father was like, no, I don't want to let go of these things even though they have no relevance to my current life, my mom was like, no, we need to let go of these things. I just need to have some order in my psychological life. But when I look at your pieces, that's actually one of the things I love about them. I also love pieces that have symmetry, but yours have a very different kind of symmetry.

Yours have a very, well, I wouldn't say they were ordered in the normal sense. So one of the things that I found fascinating was the way that you decide that a piece has certain elements arranged in a way that you like is to actually take a photograph of it. And I believe you even put it in black and white?

Bibby Gignilliat: I put it in black and white on the phone. The iPhone is amazing. You can do a lot with it. So I put it on noir, the noir setting, which is the black and white setting, and it helps me to see the value differences. And a lot of times you'll realize that there might be some undefined areas or murky areas that you might need to work on to make the piece successful. And then oftentimes I'll use the markup tool on the phone.

What I'll do is I'll take a picture of my painting at the end of the day and I'll take it home and right before bed, I have this sort of relaxing time, and I'll look at it on my phone, maybe draw a marker or two to see if maybe I want to put another object or whatever in the piece. And it helps me to finish the work. So I'll often do that, and then I'll go and make the big bold move in the studio.

Lisa Belisle: So what that says to me is that people may not be able to look at your pieces and find order in the traditional sense, but you actually have a sense of what types of order you're looking for and how you're looking to develop your pieces.

Bibby Gignilliat: And I'm looking for balance. You never want to have a really heavy object on one side without something to balance it. It doesn't have to be as big on this side, but you don't want a piece that's going to be lopsided, that visually looks like a teeter-totter, unbalanced. So I think that painting is a dance between the intuition and the analyzer. So the intuitive part of the brain is here, the analyzer is here, and it's a dance, and you don't want to dis the analyzer. You do need to think. But I try to keep my students as much as possible in the intuitive center because it allows them to be more free. And they'll say to me, oh my God, I feel so free, because in the morning of my daytime class that I teach, they're solely in the intuitive space and they create great work. And then in the afternoon, we have to look at it more from a design perspective, and is it working and are some of the principles of design coming through or something glaringly wrong? Not wrong, but it could be better. So we start getting into the analyzer, and it can cause people sometimes to get a little stuck, but the ideal is that you don't stay here.

You don't stay here. It's a dance. And they're both useful. I try to stay mostly in my intuitive space, and then at the end, I bring in the analyzer and we'll try to make sure that the piece is successful.

Lisa Belisle: When I think about the time I've spent in education, which has largely been educating people in the medical field, I think about this idea of learning styles, which I actually think academically has been disproven, but certainly it is true that we all have preferences. And I think this idea that you're either one or the other, you're either intuitive or you're an analyzer, that just kind of discounts the possibility that we all are many things. And I love that you're integrating these things and saying, well, actually, as an artist, this is what we do. And I think this probably is also true of cooking, where there's a recipe and you need to be able to put the stove on the right setting, but sometimes you pull in different ingredients or you do something slightly different because you just have a sense that that's the direction you need to go in.

Bibby Gignilliat: Yes. It doesn't quite taste right or whatever. So you're like, okay, how am I going to fix this? So you have to use your intuition or your analyzer to try to fix it.

Lisa Belisle: Is traveling a way for you to stay connected to your intuition? Because there's a planning that needs to happen, obviously logistically, but I think at least when I travel, I do a lot of running and walking in places I've never been to before.

Bibby Gignilliat: I think that's a great question. I just got back from a self-directed art residency in Barcelona. And I think why that was so successful for me was, first of all, I'm out of my comfort zone. I'm not in my day-to-day life. So the work has to be different because I'm not in my house, I'm not in my studio. That's the first thing. But then secondly, I was working differently, because I normally work on panel, that's my preference, because I love to get texture and I love to sand it. I also work on canvas, but my preference is already stretched canvas or a panel. And so I was working on loose canvas that was very flimsy. And then I challenged myself. I love working with house paint or nova color acrylic paint, and I really didn't have that there. So I brought this golden paint in tubes. So I was forced to squeeze it out of a tube and mix the colors. A lot of the colors were not great. So I had to mix my own colors, and it forced me. And I said, you're not using any collage while you're here. So I didn't use any collage for two weeks, and it forced me to just create numbers and letters and text and objects completely without collage.

And I created a really interesting body of work. And then I did collect scraps that I brought home, and I've since used them in some new totems that I created.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about the totem. What drew you to that particular model, I guess?

Bibby Gignilliat: I had taken a class years ago from a teacher that had taught me how to work with totems. And I'm a spiritual person and I love what the totem kind of represents in the Native American culture, and it's sort of a connection to something higher than ourselves. And so I really resonate with them. So I started doing them, and they're hard to do, but for some reason, they come easy for me. So I started selling a lot of them in my studio. And when I first got into the gallery, I said to Kevin, this will be one of your top selling items of mine.

And you guys were kind of not sure because you hadn't ever sold any before, but then it was just super successful. So now I have an online totem class that I just launched this year, and I have like 250 people in it, I think. And it's been fun for me to teach that and share that with people. And they happen to work really well with scraps. So I've gotten these billboard scraps and I use them often in the totems. And now I've gotten to the point where I'm working a lot on jelly plates, so it's like a giant printing plate. And I've been making my own scraps from jelly plates and putting them on the totems.

Lisa Belisle: I know I've seen some of these in the art gallery, but now I'm even more fascinated. So I'll have to go online and see some more examples of this.

Bibby Gignilliat: Check out the Barcelona ones. Actually, they're on your site now too. I just finished those. That's my most recent work.

Lisa Belisle: Well, one final question. Why do you think that there's such a strong coast connection? Because in the gallery, we now have you, we have Margot Hartford, we have Andrew Faulkner. There was a joke just yesterday I was hearing about Andrew Faulkner. He brought his work to the Portland Art Gallery. People would then buy it on the West Coast, and then they'd have to send it back to the West Coast again. So I find it really interesting that California Maine connection exists.

Bibby Gignilliat: Well, I have to say, my building, the ICB building, which is in Sausalito, is pretty much right on the water. And if you and Kevin ever come out to the Bay Area, I would love for you guys to come by and see it, because it's really an incredible building. And I think it just feels very much like Portland, actually. And what I think works well with my art here is there's a lot of people that do art similar to mine in the Bay Area, but I think it's really unique out here. And people from New York in particular and Boston seem to really resonate with it, and Maine as well. But it's just kind of this edgy, I would describe it, a little edgy, urban kind of art. So people see it and it's different and they seem to like it.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it's beautiful. Your art is very beautiful. I've enjoyed it since you've been with the gallery now two years, so I think I've had a chance to see multiple different versions of it. So it's really nice to have that connection.

Bibby Gignilliat: I'm just so honored to be in it, to be part of it.

Lisa Belisle: It's been great to talk to you today. I know you're very soon getting back on a plane to the West Coast. So we're thrilled that you've taken the time to speak with us today and appreciate the connection that you have with us here at the Portland Art Gallery.

Bibby Gignilliat: Thank you for the opportunity. I'm really grateful.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you've been listening to or watching our video podcast, Radio Maine, where, as I said at the beginning, we celebrate and explore creativity in the human spirit. Today we've done this with Portland Art Gallery artist Bibby Gignilliat. I look forward to hopefully seeing you in the not too distant future, either on the West Coast or back in the Portland Art Gallery.