Studio Lone Mountain

Studio Lone Mountain is the abode and workplace of Debra Jan Bibel, painter and photographer, retired medical scientist and editor, sometime poet, and constant Zen practitioner. The early studio space was once a library dedicated to the history of medical microbiology and immunology, known as the Elie Metchnikoff Memorial Library, housing some 1,200 books, numerous articles, and objects related to the fields. Bibel was a working scientist at the time, and besides research, she wrote articles and two books on the history of these sciences. The library contents were sold to a rare books dealer in southern California. As she was always an artist, as her father and uncle, the one time hobby transitioned to a serious, professional endeavor. Bibel’s more formal art studies began with the works and writings of Piet Mondrian, pioneer geometric abstractionist, a hard-edge painter. Her rubric became morphology, the science of shape and form as it relates to function, which was her Ph.D. Squares, rectangles, stripes, circles, and lines were the initial building blocks and focus. They in turn were the components of a city synthesis, using actual locations as models. Mondrian was a Theosophist in Paris, and his grid paintings of line and bold primary colors had spiritual and architectural purposes toward clarity of mind. Bibel, a Zen Buddhist, similarly developed her art to depict, by analogy, altered perception of structures after intense meditation. The rigidity of line and ruler has a counterpoint of bush and ink on rice paper, with the flowing curves of Chinese calligraphy and the controlled accident of sumi-e drawing. The seemingly opposite yet maintains balance and harmony and also introspective, perceptive qualities. Recent paintings merge the two sides by encompassing these approaches with acrylic on canvas. The latest series of paintings emphasizes the abstract quality of the actual, when reduced to elementals by shape and altered by hue. We are conditioned via culture and biology to define relationships and construct categories. Drummers are keen to rhythms in daily life; meditators are alert to the passing parades of sound and color; scientists examine the ideals of mathematics in behavior of objects and the paradoxical emptiness of matter. As the title of her website [www.lonemountain-art.com] expresses, Bibel’s experimental morphological art evolves. What will develop with this new direction is unknown, especially to herself. Debra Jan Bibel has a personal page on Facebook as well and that features her Amazon reviews of musical albums.