The Landscape Memories of Linda Dubin Garfield.

Some artists are so full of life and passion, they not only make you want to be a better artist, they make you want to be a better person.  And although that might sound like a Jerry Maguire-esque epiphany, Linda Dubin Garfield is definitely one of those artists.  

As soon as I entered her home, Garfield took me on a tour of her personal gallery of photos and prints inspired by her travels. I began to make a mental checklist of the places I knew I had to one day go (considering the fact that New Jersey, New York and Niagara Falls are some of the only places my suitcase has ever seen). 

Although Garfield ended up getting a degree in Educational Psychology, she still managed to incorporate art into her classroom. “When I first became a teacher I said that my medium was construction paper because I made fabulous bulletin boards,” joked Garfield. After years of dabbling around with painting and drawing, she fell in love with the sights, sounds and smells of printmaking. She eventually stopped working and became an artist full time, but she wasn’t calling herself an artist. “I was a retired person who took art classes,” Garfield said modestly.

“Then, a very dear friend of mine, Myrna Brind died and left me some money and the stipulation was, do something you really want to do.” Garfield followed her heart, and her art teacher, who was taking a course in which she and twelve female artists went to Mexico to work and run lectures. 

“I said, when I come home I’ll make the back room into a studio and I am going to call myself an artist. I think the only thing that was holding me back was the fear of someone saying, ‘You!?  An Artist?’…You put your stuff out there and it’s scary. Someone’s going to say ‘Oh, I don’t like that’ and you have to be ready for that,” said Garfield.

Upon her return home, Linda Dubin Garfield was officially calling herself an artist.

Inspired by the works of Wolf Kahn and Morris Louis, Garfield’s abstract prints indicate an evident influence of Rothko’s soft-edged forms. Her mixed media landscapes reflect memories from previous travels and her own backyard, which she keeps in her mind’s eye and then reinterprets. “I’m looking for, not the exact tree or the exact mountain, but the feel of the place or the emotions,” said Garfield, who defines these pieces as her personal memoirs.

Such brightly expressionistic monotypes, such as Exuberant Landscape, are warm enough to lend a glow, one imagines, to the gallery after hours. Similarly, her mixed media prints, including Golden Sky 3, are comforting works of verdant texture and quietly buzzing energy. Garfield’s cooler images reveal a visual sorcery that is hers alone. In Beijing Dawn, the mixture of ghostly luminosity and darkness of the overall palette suggests the exact moment before the light streams through the curtains and the sun invades the room from every angle.

Based originally in nature, her abstract digital prints reveal less of a physical place and more of an emotional response to the experiences she has had there. Rouille 1, originally a photo taken of rust, now vaguely resembles a scene from Monet’s garden after a healthy (or possibly, not-so-healthy) dose of Photoshop.

“Do you use Photoshop?” she asked.  “I could do nothing else for the rest of my life.”  I nodded to acknowledge my empathy for spending entire evenings, wide-eyed in front of the computer with no meals or bathroom breaks (either due to laziness or just pure addiction).

As if she wasn’t busy enough, Garfield founded ARTsisters, a support group for emerging female artists who offer support to each other and help women and children in the community through art. Her professional experience with teaching and counseling has resulted in the emergence of Smart Business Consulting, where she provides her marketing expertise to help artists reach both their goals and their audience through consulting, coaching and encouragement. She also donates her free time by conducting workshops that benefit Endow-a-Home, a non-profit whose mission is to help rebuild the lives of homeless women with young children.

“I like to do something that can help somebody else,” said Garfield, who gives proceeds of her income to charities such as AMIT, which “educates and cares for Israel’s youth, including the most vulnerable children in Israel,” according to the group’s mission statement.