The paintings that Gigi Begin creates are views of rural America that are romanticized, inspired by the school of American Illustration. Though the botanicals, vegetables and animals she paints are filled with realism and detail, it’s the idea she’s after. This is a stylized version that represents the essence of the subject. Her sense of humor and optimism usually find their way into his work. As a wife with four beautiful children, she’s living her dream of the life of an artist in bucolic upstate New York, and her paintings are grounded in that dream. She lives in Cambridge, New York, and draws inspiration for her paintings from life in her tranquil village as well as the surrounding landscape. Gigi honed her artistic skills with a decade in the modern fashion world of NYC, but now she prefers to draw the living world rather than fashionable, expensive clothes produced by top fashion houses.
Her artwork is created in collaboration with John Begin, her business partner and husband, a designer and woodworker of fine art furniture who collects and re-purposes the bucolic wood boards which become the mediums for her paintings. Scraps, barn boards, old post-and-beams from an old door or the lumber milling process might find their way into her art as her husband seeks out pieces with just the right amount of cracks, checks, tool marks, knots, heft and stains to bring warmth and charm to the finished piece. Gigi begins to paint directly on the board, and allows the natural beauty of the wood to shine through.
