Meet January & February's featured gallery artist Kristen Colebank and learn about her artistic process!

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ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am fascinated by the interplay of pigment and paper. Watercolor is an exciting medium to explore because of its unpredictability, yet the painting process must be tempered by careful decisions. The resulting work becomes a balance of these competing energies. As for my subjects, I seek the extraordinary in the commonplace. I explore the tensions between light and dark values, and I try to develop compositions that will draw the viewer into unexpected, yet meditative, spaces.

BIOGRAPHY

Primarily self-taught, artist Kristen Colebank has been painting in

watercolor since her first experience with the capricious medium in a high school art class in the late 1980s. She is eternally grateful that her high school had a full-time art teacher and that her teacher

included a lesson on watercolor in the sophomore-level course. A West Virginia native, Colebank currently lives in Hardy County, near the western flank of Great North Mountain.

MEMBERSHIP and AWARDS

Colebank holds Signature membership with the West Virginia Watercolor Society and is a juried associate artist with the Dickirson Gallery at Tamarack: The Best of West Virginia, in Beckley, W.Va. Colebank’s work has been accepted in national and regional exhibitions hosted by the West Virginia Watercolor Society, Pennsylvania Watercolor Society, Virginia Watercolor Society, and Southern Watercolor Society. In 2013, Colebank won a Merit Award at the biennial West Virginia Juried Exhibition. She also has been featured in three previous solo exhibitions in Harrisonburg, Va., and Lost River, W.Va. In 2019, in addition to The River House exhibition, her work will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Chuck Mathena Center in Princeton, W.Va.