Marie Gabrielle

Marie Gabrielle works in watercolor,  creating active illustrative landscapes and dynamic floral compositions.  Her  technique is confident and highly developed.  Her palette is unabashed, artfully balanced, and rich in color.  Marie's love for her subject matter show clearly in her work.  Every element of a scene is carefully rendered, with special attention to the shapes, details, and interrelationships of her subjects.

"Blue Moon Iris" is one of Marie's most beautiful and detailed renderings.  The scene depicts an ideal grouping of iris, daffodils and pansies, beneath a starlit velvet blue sky.  Marie uses her skill as an illustrator and graphic artist to emphasize the inherent design and natural beauty of the scenes and subjects she portrays. She handles color in clearly defined, highly saturated regions, giving her work a distinctly graphic quality.  At the same time close attention is paid to the integration of the composition into a comprehensive whole, giving even her most graphic works a painterly quality. 

Marie has consistently advanced her work since her beginnings as a textile designer in Lyon, France. The extent to which Marie's art and her life are intertwined becomes apparent visiting her east side Santa Cruz home.  The front lawn is consumed by an impressively dense and varied flower garden, with towering sunflowers and Cosmos bursting like fireworks.

Although elements of the images she creates are purposefully abstracted, they are otherwise highly realistic.  Her outlines are aggressive and exaggerated, and her choice of color is saturated, but still natural, preserving the essence of the light and color of the scene.

  Marie takes full advantage of her originals, creating commercially printed limited edition prints, posters, and postcards of her work.  She does professional art design as well, and recently completed a major campaign for Macy's "Colors of Povence" Flower Show.  She is also featured in the "Made in Santa Cruz" Catalog, a collection of high quality hand made products from the greater Santa Cruz area.  If you are visiting the area,  Marie's work can be viewed at "Artisans" gallery in downtown Santa Cruz, or at "Capitola Fine Arts" in Capitola, and her home studio in Santa Cruz is open by appointment year round. 

Marie has an obvious appreciation for the environment and the world around her.  Her images never fail to capture the essence of the scenes she portrays.  Her scenes of California; like the spectacular view along West Cliff Drive shown here; are more subdued in color than much of her work. Marie effectively portrays the misty blues, browns, and greens of the California Coast while still maintaining the signature vibrancy of her style.