artist's statement
Joanna Gabler’s deep experience of color forms a bridge between her two fields of interest as a painter: spiritual life and nature, especially flowers. This selection includes examples of her flower paintings, nature studies, as well as the abstractions that emerge from her meditative life.
The myriad forms, textures, patterns, and colors of flowers create a macrocosm in which we enter within the flowers and experience the space without as a remote and mysterious vastness. Joanna creates entire worlds within the confines of the petals, and her intense expression of her experience leads to a meditative comprehension of these visible signs of love in nature. She calls these paintings portraits of flowers because they develop from her encounter with each bloom as an individual living organism that makes its own gesture for humans to engage and contemplate. Using dramatic contours and vibrant colors she creates a powerful sense of the flowers’ physical presence and evokes the creative energy they embody in the world.

Inspired by inner experiences, Joanna’s abstractions and semi-abstractions show a seemingly limitless variety of different colors and forms, which grow organically, one from another. In these paintings she explores themes which have concerned her since she was a student of philosophy at the University of Warsaw in the late 1970’s: the mystery of the World and Nature, particularly the elements, the seasons, the spiritual forces in nature and man’s relation to them.

Equally important area of her pursuit is the meaning of the inner message of Christianity: the nature of Christ and Divine Mother, Mary-Sophia. These themes become variously intertwined in her meditations and in the paintings they engender. Another reoccurring theme of Joanna's paintings is the Mandala — Mandala as sacred representation of the World and Mandala as healing process.

Joanna first began to paint in watercolor in mid 1980's, when she was an assistant professor of philosophy and sociology at the Akademia Podlaska (University of Podlasie) in Siedlce near her native Warsaw. Shortly before she emigrated to the United States, she turned to pastels. In New York she pursued studies in drawing, painting, and glass work, and other media at FIT, Pratt Urban Glass Center and New York Art League, while working on Wall Street as an Information Specialist/Corporate Librarian. Since 1994 she has worked primarily in oil on canvas. Joanna moved in the summer of 2002 to the northern Berkshires from New York, her home since her arrival in America.

Her paintings have been purchased by several American and European private collectors and institutions, and she has recently held two solo exhibitions in New York City. A full list of solo and group exhibitions can be found here.

Joanna is also an art therapist. She has developed a unique approach to the release of the trauma through the experience of color in creative exercises and meditative work, which she has implemented in workshops at the Chrysalis Community in Pownal, Vermont, a community for people in the advanced stages of AIDS and holistic retreat center, where she has been leading therapy sessions since January of 2003, as well as the Women's House of Peace in North Adams, Massachusetts and Sweetwood Retirement Community in Williamstown, Massachusetts.