ARTIST STATEMENT

To me art is a process. First is the process of learning and finessing one’s skill. Then it is the process of finding and acting on inspiration. It is creative meditation. It is the process of allowing emotions, insecurities, and illuminations to wander through one’s consciousness while hands are busy acting as interpreters or simply holding active presence. It is therapeut

ic and aggravating. It is the way of allowing the raw material to reincarnate, exposing its blueprint and offering itself to manipulation. It is trusting both the symbiotic relationship between the artist and the materials and the struggle to push limitations both in materials and in self. It is the embodiment of the searching, finding and losing. It is a reflection of perpetual cyclical flow of life: birth to death, confusion to clarity, joy to sadness, pain to health, and so on. It is the enterprise of revealing the collaboration to the world, to interpretation from others with similar views and those who look through different veils.

The sculptures and paintings I create are my path of processing the world, its infinite span of complexities and imperfect beauties through a multi-dimensional, undefined vernacular. Mine is an artistic vocabulary of surface textures, forms, and colors. The pieces are the markers of my process, my evolution, my regression, and my metamorphosis. At times my work follows patterns and other times they shape shift into a new vein. I devotedly allow for that spontaneity in creativity. The human making the art changes, therefore the art will at times follow and sometimes I return to my familiar base to investigate more deeply my beginning. Watching my grandfather refashion discarded soda cans into pinwheels when I was a child was an influential precursor to my practice of harvesting material deemed useless and reshaping it in a way that raises one’s spirit. Most of my work is reductive. I remove layers to expose the mystery underneath.

My work is the representation of the basic movement from light to dark and the ebb and flow of living. It embraces scars and imperfections as the strongest attributes. My collection does not simply go from raw material to finished product. I ask of it a full life cycle. I stress it, color it, carve it, burn it, strip it back down to almost bare and take it back to dimension and colors of its present life. It is its journey, being polished, redone, and finished repetitively that gives it its true integrity. It gives me my true integrity. Art is my process.


BIOGRAPHY

Greg Joubert works as both a sculptor and a painter. His woodwork is stunning using both sustainable exotic woods and those he has a special permit to harvest from the Jemez Forests in New Mexico. His paintings are both minimal mixed media with gold, copper and silver leaf and colorful abstracts.

Joubert was born in 1977 and raised in the seaside New England town of Hingham, Massachusetts. His mother and maternal grandparents encouraged his roots in creativity and craftsmanship. Joubert gained his first experiences in woodworking by his grandfather’s side while the elder practiced carpentry. Uninspired by what traditional secondary school offered, Joubert rebelled and followed his own path of learning by spending hours in study and reflection in the earthy classroom of the beaches and forest surrounding his home. Much of his time was spent in contemplation of the spectrums of human action and inspiration.

While studying at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, he once again found the curriculum of customary education to lack the integrity and profundity he desired to maintain. His search for a career that would sustain his creativity pointed him across the country to a fine woodworking program in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In a leap of faith and determination for furthering an inspired life, he relocated to Santa Fe sight unseen. While his time in the woodworking program developed within him a deeper knowledge of craftsmanship, it was through his interactions with several artists in the Santa Fe community that he was formally initiated into his life as a sculptor. After graduation, his experimentation and journey into the world of art continued to deepen. Presently, he continues to expand his palette and style working in his Santa Fe-based studio.