Colleen Gilgenbach
Viroqua, Wisconsin
 

Colleen Gilgenbach loves a challenge and the impressive range of her art attests to that. And to her remarkable talent. The Driftless Area artist has demonstrated her considerable ability in a number of media – pastels, watercolors, jewelry and, most recently, in three-dimensional objects she calls assemblages.

Gilgenbach, 49, wife, mother, art teacher and businesswoman, is also a storyteller. And much of her work carries messages she feels compelled to send.

She is, for instance, unhappy about stereotypes about women. Much of her current work is inspired by women who inspire her -- iconic figures such as the Mary, the mother of Christ, and Kali, the Indian goddess.

Colleen Gilgenbach has been exploring the potential for personal artistic expression since she was a young girl, one of five children, in Wisconsin’s Fox Valley. In grade school, she was often picked to create bulletin board displays. As art became a consuming interest, and she learned she could excel at it, and enjoyed the recognition it brought her.

Her parents encouraged that interest, not least because of her father’s practical judgment that art, done well, might be “a way to make some money.”

In high school she found herself the only female enrolled in a drafting class. The first day of the semester was made memorable by the instructor hoping, aloud, that she wasn’t there “just to meet boys.” Fortunately, she says, her work in class won him over and she was pleased to find in later days that he had posted some of her assignments on the classroom bulletin board.

Gilgenbach got her first chance to put her drawing talent to profitable use when her father arranged to have her hired as a draftsman at the company for which he worked. From then on, she was on her own and won a position as an industrial draftsman at Mercury Marine.

She spent 13 years at Mercury Marine, where she met and married Hugh Gilgenbach. When she became pregnant with their son, Nicholas, now a teenager, she quit, and soon learned about the practice of “auditing” college courses at the nearby campus of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Eventually, she formally enrolled there and took most of the courses in its art program a second time. Because her second exposure to those classes was with different professors, “I got two perspectives on every subject – a really valuable experience.”

Hugh Gilgenbach decided to take early retirement from Mercury in 1989 and the family set out to find a new place to live. Their goal was to locate a Waldorf School in a rural setting for their son. After a three-month motor home tour of much of the nation, the Gilgenbachs settled on the Viroqua area. The Driftless Area won out over several better known places, including Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Gilgenbachs now live in a home they built on a rolling 55-acre site west of Viroqua and Colleen works in a bright and airy studio featuring an expansive view of a valley to the south of the house.  Nicholas now attends the Youth Initiative High School and Colleen teaches a class in drawing there.

Gilgenbach turned entrepreneur when she and four others formed the Viroqua Independent Visual Artists, or VIVA, a co-operative Gallery in Viroqua three years ago. The gallery co-op now has 17 members and Gilgenbach has been pleased at not only the reception for her displayed works, but in finding paying customers for it.

“We’re proud of how the gallery has flourished, especially in a town of only 4,000.”

It might be good business to stick to the kind of work that she knows sells well – her pastels, watercolors and jewelry – but Colleen Gilgenbach is uncomfortable with routines, and predictability. She prefers to keep trying new things. If that means she disappoints admirers of her drawing, so be it, she says.

Thus, she has been working hard in the past year on a new medium for her, the three-dimensional objects she calls assemblages. Many take the form of miniature shrines, a way for her to express her fascination for inspiring figures of history, religion and ancient cultures, many of them female.  A number of them pay homage to Mary, so many, in fact, that Gilgenbach has worried that she might become viewed as obsessive about Christian symbols. To demonstrate that she is not, she has pushed herself to investigate and treat historic or mythic figures from other religious traditions.

Given the wide range of her interests, one would suspect that Colleen Gilgenbach is willing to try almost anything in art, and she has. But she freely admits that not all of her experiments have satisfied her.

Gilgenbach’s views on the various media she’s tried:
  
On watercolor: “I like the immediacy of it, the brush strokes. I love the way things sort of run together. I like working on wet paper.

On pastel: “I like that; drawing is my favorite thing. They way I do pastel, it’s a lot like drawing. I love the feel of it, of getting my hands dirty.

On Jewelry: “I just love rocks and stones. I don’t just use glass beads.  I love the stones – beads are too slow. I like things that move quickly and I like the texture of stone, the colors. My husband and I are rock collectors; we have piles of stones all around the house.

On oil painting: “It’s really frustrating for me. It all smears together.  You get oil paint on everything; it’s so messy and it wrecks stuff.”

“I work intuitively. I admit that I frequently don’t know where a piece will go.”

Gilgenbach’s experimentation will surely continue. She has just purchased a used kiln and is eager to try her hand at sculpture. And she says she’d love to take a class in ceramics.

Creating, teaching and doing her share of the work at the VIVA gallery keeps Colleen Gilgenbach busy. But the growing recognition of her work makes it worth it, she says.