Deirdre Shibano trained at The Art Students League of NYC with many notable teachers, including Andrew Lukach, Vaclav Vytlacil and Robert Glacier. After receiving the Merit Scholarship at a young age, she had her first one person show at the Rappaport Gallery in New York. At the League, her focus was figurative work and abstract expressionism.

After moving to California, however, she became totally enamored with the surrounding beauty of the California landscape. She continues to paint and teach workshops in Napa Valley and the Bay Area... "As a colleague of mine once said... 'I feel like I own that piece of land now' How true!"

Setting up one's easel on the side of a road, beneath a cluster of trees or on the top of a hill, and experiencing the wind, smell and light... there is nothing like it.

Although I have been a studio painter for many years, concentrating on the figure and still-life, I now believe that I didn't "see" until I started painting out on location. Being a plein-air painter, one gets to experience not only the amazing beauty of your surroundings, but you see the world with new eyes. Seeing colors in shadows which were once just dark and gold in the reflections of light... the various hues that make up a blade of grass or a field of wildflowers. One cannot help but be totally enamored with the world that surrounds us. One becomes a part of that experience, if not intimately connected with it. My goal is to captivate not just what I see, but communicate the light and energy which I experience and feel... and share the land which belongs to us all!

Deirdre Shibano is now represented by "Sticks & Stones Gallery", Calistoga, Ca.


Deirdre Shibano has been represented by: Artists Alley Gallery in San Francisco, 345 Gough St., Main Elements Gallery in Calistoga, and the Agora Gallery, 530 W. 25th St. NYC.