Today we’d like to introduce you to Cybele Rowe.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
For over 35 years Cybele has been working in a variety of media and has built, taught and exhibited on three continents. After her postgraduate studies in Australia, she was awarded a scholarship that allowed her to relocate to NYC. During her decade in the New York art scene, she created and showed in many galleries from the Hamptons to Atlanta.
Bergdorf Goodman, New York, exhibited and sold over 100 of her paintings and sculptures. Her artworks have been showcased at The World Bank, the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center.
In 1998, she moved her family to a small town in the Cleveland National Forest, a short distance from Laguna Beach, Calif. In 2016, She moved her studio to Yucca Valley, a location that had been on her radar for 30 years because of its desert landscape and temperate climate. Cybele has taught, worked and exhibited in bronze, ceramic, wood, concrete, polymers, painting and drawing.
OC Weekly Magazine named her one of the “Most Influential People 2015”. Her ability to interact with large groups of children and adults comes from years of interaction with large groups of elementary school children in an after-school enrichment program “The Great Clay Adventure”. In 2013 she created and started teaching the college course called “Art Survival”.
In 2018, her large-scale sculptures were the centerpieces of the Los Angeles Art Show and The Palm Springs Art Show, as well as the featured work for a new Wexler home in Palm Springs. In June, her sculpture “Meditations on Tau” a research work that cumulated in a sculptural form that is wall mounted in the main foyer of Alzheimer’s Therapy Research Institute of Keck School of Medicine, SC. San Diego.
Recently, she has returned to her first passion that is monumental ceramics. Her work is on permanent display in front of the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA and in the permanent collection in the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Fu-Ping, China. Currently, she is building a series of large-scale vessels for my built-in-place ceramic show, as part of the HWY 62 Open Studio Art Tours, October 2018.
Please tell us about your art.
The process, is in finding the right medium that suites the message and then pushing that material to what I feel is its most expressive form. My applied methods, conjured over years of research and thinking, sets me free in the studio with a fully evolved arsenal in an abundance of materials. Most recently, I am focused on ceramics, lightweight concrete and one-off bronze castings (which I taught). I believe that abstraction is a mindset where what needs to be said now lies is in the space between, opening a channel of questioning while quieting the mind.
With sculptures spanning the codex of clay, wood, concrete papercrete and metal, I create organically and intuitively. My meditations lead my hands to read the form during the making process, constructing a unique model through almost subconscious anticipation.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
Work, work and work, No one artists hold the keys to feeling successful. It’s a quiet building of courage, hope and the occasional entrance of “genius” only for rare moments. My major advice to my younger self would be: “Nothing ever looks good half way finished, hold onto the making process of the artwork until completion. It is only then that I now make a decision about its validity in my art making life.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I have a website
http://www.cybelerowe.com
Instagram cybeleroweart.
The Hwy 62 Studio Art Tours 2018. Oct 13-14 and Oct 20-22. It is a lot of fun and I would encourage people to make the drive. I will be making monumental fired in place ceramics.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.cybelerowe.com
- Email: cybele@cybelerowe.com
- Instagram: cybeleroweart
Image Credit:
Images with Big white sculpture By Miguel Perez.
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