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Sybil Gibson was born February 18, 1908 in Dora Alabama. Her father was a prosperous coal mine operator but she lived most of her adult life in poverty. Sybil was college educated, an elementary school teacher, a mother of one daughter, interested in real estate and the financial market. She began paining in November 1963 at 55 years old when she became enchanted with a piece of gift wrapping paper in a downtown Miami Florida store. When she picked up a brush to create her own wrapping paper with materials at hand ... tempera and brown paper bags ... she was seized with a compulsion to paint that lasted three decades. Her difficult years, in which she was beset by health and financial problems, pushed her to the braking point and in 1971, just after her work had attracted the attention of the Miami Art Museum, she returned to Alabama. In Birmingham she lived in a seedy hotel, continued to paint, received high praise from critics, but sold few paintings. In 1981 she moved to a home for the elderly in Jasper Alabama. Finally she moved to a facility in Florida where she was closer to her daughter. An operation restored most of her sight, and she was able to keep working on her art. Her pictures most often depicting people, animals and sometimes flowers, are painted with tempera and house paint on paper bags and newspaper. The subtlety of color and impressionistic quality comes from her practice of wetting the bag or newspaper and painting the image before the bag or newspaper would dry. Sybil died in a nursing home January 2, 1995 in Dunedin Florida. Her work is in many museum collections including the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Fayette Art Museum, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Museum of American Folk Art. |
Vase of Flowers 22 x 27 unframed acrylic on newspaper $1,200 Portrait 18 x 22 unframed acrylic on cardboard paper $1,000 SOLD Purple Floral 22 x 27 acrylic on newspaper $1,200 SOLD Faces 26 x 30 framed $1,500 acrylic on paper Yellow Sunburst 16 x 20 $900 acrylic on grocery bag
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