Artist Works | Artist's Show Notes

WORK AND VISION

Gin Pollock is an artist of exceptional talent and vitality whose art alternates between works that grapple with the lonely side of human experience, such as “Blue Monday” and “Blue Groom,” and pieces, such as “Long Strange Trip,” that celebrate life and its possibilities with exuberance and wit. Though rigorously schooled in art history and technique -- her works resound with echoes of the Masters and her compositions have impeccable balance and movement -- Gin Pollock’s work also reveals a tremendous unbridled energy, utterly personal and unbound by abstract thought.

Pollock’s work reflects Picasso, Miro, and Matisse in its bold and fluid depictions of the human figure. Her use of color -- brilliant, highly varied, totally self-assured -- is completely her own.

Her body of work achieves that rare feat for an artist of creating a complete alternate world -- unique and self-sufficient, enchantingly strange and yet movingly familiar. Her figures and their objects -- ladders, chalices, doorways, jester’s caps -- whirl on the winds of her imagination through kaleidoscopic dreamscapes of peril and promise.

Her work derives further richness from her explorations of Jungian archetypes and her recurring use of certain private symbols such as the “Blue Prince,” a rescuing, Prince Charming type of figure, and the aforementioned chalices and ladders.

Adding yet another attraction to these beautiful works is the artist’s deadpan wit and resilient sense of perspective, reflected in such titles as “Mermaid Mardi Gras,” “Pull Up a Chair, Watch God Juggle,” and “Eden Above, Looters Below.” In the world of Gin Pollock, pain and loneliness pose formidable challenges, but art and beauty, love and humanity usually carry the day.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Michigan in 1958, Gin Pollock originally planned to be a journalist but her first bouts with manic depression, at age nineteen, put to rest any conventional career plans. She then picked up a pencil and began to draw. She went on to study art under Jakob Engler at the renowned Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland, and earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado at Denver. She furthered her studies at the Art Students League of Denver, studying with abstract artist Dale Chisman and pastelist Doug Dawson.

Gin Pollock has exhibited her work in both Denver and Santa Fe. She loves teaching art and art history, and has done so in settings ranging from convents to preschools, psychiatric wards to university (the University of Colorado at Denver). She has also lectured on manic depression and the creative process. During down phases, she avoids other people, as well as her studio, and has her husband Carl tell inquirers that she has “gone to Italy.” When up, Gin Pollock paints and draws with a shimmering vengeance..