Artist Sample

Photo©Cindy Gilbane Click for larger image!

Artist Statement

The body of work seen in this exhibit stems from a collection of landform studies and research done in reverse. Initially, it was the colors that attracted me. These colors were created by the light that fell on the landforms at a certain time of day. The light source and angle were obvious, but I wondered why the shadow values changed the way they did. These shadow values revealed underlying landforms, but then why were they formed in this particular way? From questioning in reverse back to the source of these shapes and forms, geological research became necessary

First of all, the New Haven Harbor area is where the Connecticut Valley meets the Long Island Sound. The Connecticut Valley is, however, a rift valley, in geological terms. It was created by a partial separation of the super content Pangea.

It seems that 300 million years ago, during the early Triassic period, all the contents collided to form this super continent Pangea. This event in turn created the Appalachian Mountain Chain. Locally, the Northwestern African area collided with our North American area.

200 million years ago Pangea began to break up. The mid Atlantic ridge formed as did several other faults and rifts. Portions of Africa were broken apart by this spreading and the Atlantic Ocean was formed. The portion that is now western Connecticut was a piece of Northwestern Africa that had been left behind. Since The Connecticut Rift Valley was originally part of the ancient boundary between our portion of the North American Plate and the old Africa plate, it became a mildly active fault marking the line where some separation of these continents occurred, stretch marks of a sort.

This rift valley later became the lowest and easiest area for glaciers, and glacial melt to travel on, passing through New Haven Harbor and on into the Long Island Sound.

Artist Biography

Cindy’s work springs from a life long fascination with nature. Capturing the organic design and vivid colors of these forms has been her goal.

For the past twenty-five years, Cindy has exhibited her work through out southern Connecticut. She has completed several botanical and zoological murals for small museums and dozens of commissioned landscapes and botanical illustrations for local businesses, magazines and private collectors.

Cindy studied studio art and printmaking at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. Later she received her Bachelors in Art Education from Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven and became an art teacher. She has completed several graduate courses in scientific illustration and biology at Southern and the University of New Haven. Currently she is finishing her Masters degree with a concentration in the fine arts and biology at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

After teaching art in both private and public schools for 15 years, Cindy has left her education career behind. Finally, she is working out of her studio in West Haven as a full time professional artist. As a member of The Guild of Scientific Illustrators, the American Botanical Illustrators Society and the Connecticut Botanical Society, she exhibits widely and stays current with modern trends.

Working from nature is and always has been her passion.

Artist Sample

Photos ©Peter Kindlmann Click for larger image!

Artist Biography

Trained as an engineer and physicist, Peter Kindlmann has taught electrical engineering design at Yale for 40 years. In that time he has seen the complete arc from transistorized beginnings to today’s technological complexities and clutter. From his love of botanical photography in the 1970s he returned, after a 20 year hiatus, to digital photography, using the camera to explore nature.

As a technology, digital photography particularly appealed to him because of the “terms of partnership” it could offer, as a technological enhancement of the responsibilities of the photographer, rather than as a technical substitute for them. He feels a strong personal responsibility for all aspects of photography. He rarely crops, has used a single fixed-focal length lens for up to a year, shoots in RAW format (a kind of “digital negative”), uses PhotoShop as sparingly as possible, and does his own printing on an Epson Stylus Pro 4000. He is happy that computer technology can do the previously impossible, such as making lenses ideal beyond what can be physically realized e.g. by correcting residual chromatic aberration, and to realize a flexibility of exposure that can go beyond the capabilities of film, both in taking a picture and in printing it.

In his photography he aims to go counter to the trends of technology’s ever greater complexities, but instead to use technology in striving for the greatest simplicity, representationally and symbolically. Photography has been shaped by several “industrial revolutions” in the 20th century, most recently by very complex digital technology mainly used for producing pictures that are cheap, colorful and plentiful. However, the fact that the art of the darkroom need no longer be part of making pictures, that the information of a picture can now be held and manipulated by computer, need not, must not, mean that the photographer has less responsibility toward his subject.

Digital photography is at the furthest remove from the art of painting, where the skill of the hand and the intellectual tools of the mind can achieve astonishing results. Yet Peter Kindlmann feels that digital photography can avoid being another technological triumph for which the engineer owes an apology to the artist, because there are ample opportunities for personal diligence and judgment, amplified by the ability of our “machines” to do physical and informational work better than we can. That, at least, is the direction of his efforts (with deep gratitude for perspectives gained from Richard Benson and Harold Shapiro.)

Sincere thanks to the Friends of the WWML for sponsoring this exhibit.

All images copyright of the artist.  Please contact the artist to use pictures.