It was a bitterly cold and gray day in February, 2014. Artist, Gail Winbury returned from a brief trip in Woodstock, New York. She walked into her studio, and was shocked and troubled with the bright vibrant colors of her paintings. This painter, who was a talented colorist, suddenly stopped using warm bright colors, restricting her pallet to blacks, blues and ochres. A few weeks later, in early March, Winbury realized it was the anniversary of both of her parents’ deaths. She was also about have a significant birthday. For the next two years, her paintings reflected a grappling with aging, mortality and
the ensuing losses that come with time’s passage. All of Winbury’s work has a uniquely psychological orientation and a concern with the human condition.
Gail Winbury was born in Chicago and has lived in Massachusetts and New Jersey. She grew up painting with her father a scientist. Visitors from over the world became part of her extended family. Currently, she lives in New Jersey. Her studio is in East Orange, New Jersey. It was once a Johnson and Sibley manufacturing factory. Winbury is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her background and training as an artist merges seamlessly with her prior background as a psychologist.
Most of Winbury’s oil paintings are beautiful, expressive- deeply personal and psychological. She blends universal human experience, memory, emotion and psychological theory with abstraction. Her work intentionally has visual tensions which invite the viewer to slow down from a plugged-in world, to contemplate and find themselves in the work. Winbury communicates profoundly in visual/abstract ways where words maybe inadequate to express an experience.
She has had over 10 solo exhibitions and many group shows. Winbury shows throughout the United States and Europe. During an exhibition in Germany in 2017, she participated in several artist panels as well as radio interviews. She gives talks and moderates panels on topics such as “Women in Abstract Expressionism”, “The Psychology of Art and Dark Humor”, “Creativity in Poets and Visual Artists”
Winbury was a Painting Resident at the School of Visual Arts, Manhattan. She received an Artist Fellowship in Italy from the Bau Foundation. There her studio was a cell in a 1000-year old castle. This castle had no electricity and no usable running water. That is where Winbury’s collage practice began. She was also awarded a grant to teach and participate in an artist-exchange in Israel and other artist residencies. Winbury studied with iconic American painters Joan Snyder and Brenda Goodman. She also studied for 15 years with Chinese-American international artist Dorothy Jung and at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Winbury has won numerous awards including the Curtis Hilliard Memorial Award, 2001, and the Curators Choice Award (2015, 2016). She is in multiple publications. Most notably: a catalog of her solo works, an art catalog from Matera, Italy, and an e-book and CD on Bach’s Cello Solos by Stephan Hanford. Her work is in the virtual collection of the past president of the American Psychological Association. Winbury has been featured in important blogs such as “Painters Talking Paint” and “ART Spiel” and on Channel 21.
An early body of work (2011-2016), explored the female sensibility and body from an empathic point of view. She fought William de Kooning’s depiction of women as aggressive slashes, gorgons and medusas, and yet was deeply influenced by his work. Winbury used abstract language to express her ideas about women. As a working psychologist, for years she had treated women with eating disorders many of whom had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder related to sexual trauma. These were women, who at times, used their own bodies as canvases, a visual expression of their pain and conflict.
"The Inscrutable: our intimate selves", a recent series from 2017-2018, is a visual journal. Started in an artistic fallow period, each piece holds the truth of a mental state, mood or memory. However, in a current series, Winbury creates serene, up-lifting and mysterious paintings. Winbury is a mature, prolific, mid-career artist. She has a gift for understanding the uncertainties, conflicts, and human yearnings concomitant with being alive. Using oil paint and collage, she makes those manifest in abstract visual language. This expressive, empathic and articulate artist, creates art which reflects the enduring triumphs, joys, and losses of the human condition.