ARLENE TRIBBIA

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Find Arlene's art in Issue 10 (purchase a print copy)

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Arlene Tribbia is an artist and poet who works across disciplines, layering the metaphorical qualities of poetry and language in her work. Stories of hers have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and her poems have been published widely as well as internationally. Her drawings, paintings, painted poems, and novel book sculptures have been exhibited in many places, from dance halls to skyscrapers as well as in art galleries.​

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"For the past decade, I’ve been drawing and painting landscapes from" my imagination, dreams and memories, and now it seems: as prophecy. Neon or some otherworldly color often sneaks in to make an appearance and eclipse the natural beauty of the cascade green rainforest where I live and am endlessly inspired by.

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Watching the sunset or the clouds shuffling over the hills here on the West Coast, it’s easy for me to imagine how the forest and skies could be an uncanny reflection of another world, another future.  

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I’ll often begin a painting by scribbling something down on the paper or canvas: grabbing any word that comes to mind, like yes or will and maybe road trip – I love road trips – or sometimes I’ll take a fragment from one of my poems and then cover over it with a wash of color before drawing back into it with pencil, crayon, ink, whatever I have on hand.

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A painting or drawing is, as we artists like to say: a conversation. For me, it’s also about poetry and what’s unseen.

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I like to imagine that every layer of a drawing or painting holds a kind of intangible energy, just like a poem does. It might be something as simple as a handful of random feelings left behind from whatever I was imagining while I was working. Or it could even be something particular I left behind: like the memory I have of a long-ago moonlit summer night when anything was possible, when everything appeared to be poetic and it seemed as if we were all darlings of something much larger that we didn’t know."​​