Artist Bio
Bailey Gamble grew up in mid-Michigan farm country and moved to Alaska for work in 2016. Born in 1982, she has been drawing, beading, braiding, knitting or otherwise doing something creative for her entire life. Also a lover of physics and design, she spends the bulk of her waking hours serving as an engineer with the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative. When there is light, she spends her free time climbing mountains, most often dog-friendly peaks in the Chugach. During these outings she collects the reference photos from which she paints. When there is darkness, she makes art!
She is inspired by early Alaska landscape artists Sydney Laurence and Eustace Ziegler, as well as modern landscape painters Kimball Geisler, Matt Smith, Kyle Ma and a long, long list of others. She loves to study and to apply an engineering-type discipline to painting. The forms in her paintings, their angles, the way the light reflects and changes with distance, the way the shadows fall – must align with physics! Despite a high degree of rigidity in certain aspects, she is also a deeply curious and spiritual person, perceiving art as a portal, an opportunity to see in a different way, recognizing that each piece does not materialize from her mind alone, but clearly flows from somewhere more interesting and mysterious.
“I rejoice to hear that thou takest pains with thine art, for in this wonderful new age, art is worship. The more thou strivest to perfect it, the closer wilt thou come to God. What bestowal could be greater than this, that one’s art should be even as the act of worshipping the Lord? That is to say, when thy fingers grasp the paintbrush, it is as if thou wert at prayer in the Temple.”
Extract from a Tablet of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá