Biography of Georgina Forbes
Georgina Forbes work is in the collection of the FLEMING MUSEUM, Burlington, VT., and in collections at the Brookline Savings Bank, Brookline, MA, World Wide Business Centers,Inc.,575 Madison Ave at 57th St, NYC, New England Life Insurance Company, Boston, MA., Consolidated Group Trust, Framingham, MA, and the Boston Redevelopment Authority, City Hall, Boston, MA., Mass Eye and Ear Hospital, Boston, MA, and Pandick Press International, Boston MA. Her work is also in numerous private collections, with a list available.
Forbes has exhibited her work from 1972 to the present throughout the United States and in Trinidad, in numerous solo and group shows. Her work was featured in Old House Interiors magazine, Woodstock Common Magazine, and has been reviewed in many newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Rutland Herald, Seven Days, Valley News, Times Argus, and The Vermont Standard.
Born in Boston, MA., Forbes began painting in childhood, motivated by a number of artists in her family, including her mother, grandmother and several aunts. Her great uncle Abbott Thayer was a well- known American artist, and left a strong legacy in her mother's family. Her cousin Edward Forbes was an accomplished painter and did important research on color pigments as an early director of the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA. Georgina Forbes studied with noted watercolorist Loring Coleman, and later, with the late James Gahagan, Director of the Hofmann School of Art in Provincetown, MA for many years, and a teacher at Pratt Institute in New York City and at the Vermont Studio Center ..
Forbes has traveled extensively in the U.S., Africa, the Carribean, Central America, and Europe. She created an interactive, installation sculpture called "The Peace Hunger Kitchen" with collaboration from others, and traveled throughout the northeast for nearly two years, between 1986-1988, working with over thirty events and locations, including television and media events, an installation in the Russell Rotunda of the U.S. Senate., and an installation for several weeks outside of the National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
She received a Master's degree in Counseling Psychology from Antioch University in 1978, and went on to train and teach for seven years in The Institute of Human Ecology Training program involving art, sound, movement and body work in the process of personal growth and healing. She was in private practice for many years, and also worked in community mental health. Always Forbes painted, and her work has continually reflected the interface between her outward experience with emotional and spiritual healing, and her inner process. The reality of color fields as energetic vibrations, and their relationship to the creation of reality, holds an endless fascination for Forbes. So too, the medium of water plays a major role as both subject and source in Forbes’ art.
Forbes states: " Through color, water, light, pattern and shape, I work to integrate landscape images which are at once explicit, symbolic, and expressionistic. These are unabashedly emotional paintings. Creation is, by nature, about transformation; birth, and death. Painting is my way to explore the frontier where risk, intention and conscious use of skill , lead to expressing light and elemental forces manifesting spirit. Earth, air, fire, and water—these elemental forces are all powerful, even as “civilization” puts all at risk. We are connected to all life, and heir to the powerful truths that govern all beings. We are called to walk through fertile darkness, to walk in light, to find healing, and to allow our feeling selves to breathe consciousness into the acts of living that form our lives on earth. "