Artist Don Sibley is a bit of an anomaly.
By nature, artists are visual folks. They tend to let their work speak for them, and sometimes struggle to articulate their process and perspective.
Mr. Sibley, 75, has found a way to step outside himself and to clearly illuminate his 50-year journey as an artist. His latest representational paintings are on display at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center through Dec. 18.
Mr. Sibley, a West Tisbury resident, is a self-effacing, whimsical man possessed of both verbal and artistic preciseness. A left-brain, right-brain balance, if you will. His second-floor studio, 100 paces from the home he shares with wife Linda Sibley, is neat, and his work is compartmentalized.
He doesn’t rummage to find past work, and the only evidence of artistic flurry is a dropcloth in his work area that is adorned with Pollock-like paint spatters. We are able to follow an artful life from his early days as a landscape watercolorist through several phases to his current ouvre, dominated by infinitely detailed representational pieces, which can be seen as a mysterious look at a single cell and as a thunderous view of the cosmos from a million miles away. Quite something.
As we talk, Mr. Sibley warns me off from putting too much stock in what he says about his artistry. “I’m suspicious of myself telling my story. I’m leery about what artists say, including myself, about their work. I think we perhaps build a story that we can understand about our work and tell it to others,” he says with a wry smile.
But facts are facts, and the life details of the son of a Baltimore mailman show the value of listening to one’s half-understood urges and making some damn good choices along the way.
“My sister was the artist in the family. I was good at math and science,” he said. “When I was finishing high school in 1958, Harvard University was looking to expand its base of mostly elite students, reaching out to include kids from blue-collar families in communities like Towson, just outside the city of Baltimore,” he said.
“I had good grades, and when they came to Towson, they recruited me to go to Harvard,” he said with a remaining touch of astonishment. Mr. Sibley signed up and saw a whole new world in Harvard Square. “I also liked classical music, and I remember walking down Brattle Street and a guy passed me whistling an obscure Beethoven piece that I knew. ‘Wow, this is different,’ I thought.”
Four years later, Mr. Sibley possessed a degree in social psychology and no clear idea of what was next. The U.S. Army had a very clear idea for his future, and revealed its plan for him. According to Mr. Sibley, “I got some of the best advice in my life from a friend who said, ‘You can get drafted and probably spend the next two years jumping out of airplanes, or enlist for three years and have a choice of what you want,’ he told me.”
Mr. Sibley signed up for language school, a choice that opened a path to his future. After two years studying and becoming proficient in Russian, the Army dispatched him to Japan, and that changed everything.
He discovered the purity and simplicity of Japanese gardens, most specifically bonsai trees. “I spent my down time from monitoring Russian-language broadcasts learning the culture, and studying the gardens,” he recalled.
And something else happened as a result. Mr. Sibley decided to go to art school. “The Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston accepted me. I was 25 years old, older than most of the kids, but had some verbal skills,” he said.
After completing classical art training, Mr. Sibley was hired as an instructor by the MFA, a post he retained for almost 40 years while pursuing his art and courting his wife Linda, a Cambridge resident.
In the early 1970s, life smiled again. “Islander Mait Edey, a Cambridge
neighbor, called me one day and offered to sell us nine acres in West Tisbury at a rock-bottom price. We had no money to invest in real estate. I’d been to the Vineyard once and liked it, but had to say no.
“Less than 24 hours later, my dad called and said the U.S. Post Office had offered him a buyout, including a full year’s salary. We made a deal that he would buy the land and we would buy half from him,” Mr. Sibley said.
So a house was built in the woods, a studio added, and Mr. Sibley spent several decades commuting to the MFA and constructing a Japanese garden of his own, along with a greenhouse that is chockablock with a mini-forest of his beloved bonsai trees.
His reputation as a master Japanese gardener grew, and the folks managing
the Mytoi Japanese garden on Chappaquiddick island just off Edgartown came calling. He was its head gardener for 14 years, overseeing the refurbishing of that 14-acre bit of anomalous magic after Hurricane Bob flattened it in 1991.
Mr. Sibley is not a serial gallery exhibitor, showing his work only every five to seven years. “That’s about the time interval it’s worked out to be,” he said. But he’s been busy in the interim.
The onetime realistic landscape watercolorist has been morphing and edging further into abstract work in oil, acrylics, and multimedia effects, incorporating textures from good old Island sand, artifacts, and minerals such as malachite.
He’s got some whimsy as well, completely encasing a laptop and a radio in a thick coating of textured plaster and color. “The radio works,” he said, plugging it in to emit soft classical jazz. “You can’t change the channel, of course, so a buyer would have to know that,” he smiled.
Mr. Sibley makes pencil drawings of his ideas, perhaps has made a thousand over the years. Only a few become finished artwork, often a variant of the sketch. He says the death of his parents in the early 2000s provided new direction. “They were good parents and I loved them, but their passing was not traumatic, yet something changed, perhaps that idea that there is no generation between you and the grave,” he said.
Asked where he stands today in the continuum of his artistry, Mr. Sibley said, “This is a middle phase, and my sense is this is a good road, though when you’re not doing realism, the idea of when a painting is done is more difficult to decide.”
Given his life choices to date, Mr. Sibley’s decisions will likely be just fine.
Don Sibley’s work will be on display at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center through Dec. 19, during movie showtimes and by appointment. For more information, visit mvfilmsociety.com.