Jennifer Tibbetts, chose not to paint the moors, the dales or the coast of Yorkshire, England where she was born and raised. Instead, Tibbetts chose to fill the sketchbooks of her youth with drawings and paintings of faces. Face after face of family members and of friends, teachers, neighbors and townspeople. Tibbetts' paintings eventually led her to acceptance at the Birmingham College of Art. There, she put aside portraiture in favor of the dominant painting mode of that time – abstraction!

Tibbetts left the Birmingham College of Art to relocate to the U.S. where she went on to earn a BS in studio art at Southern Connecticut State College, and then continued her studies at the University of Massachusetts where she earned an MFA in painting.

The portraiture in Visages, while a major stylistic departure from Tibbett’s gestural abstraction of the past 15 years, is also a return to her natural inclination to paint the face. This time, Tibbets has chosen not the faces of people she knows, but rather, the faces of strangers. Tibbetts’ motley crew of portraits include men, woman, and children of myriad races, and from a range of occupations and social strata. Tibbetts’ painted faces cohere in that they all don masks; some ceremonial, some cosmetic, some protective.

Through the scale and composition of the portraits and with the repetitive use of the mask image, Tibbetts paintings emphasize the external aspects of the person whose face is painted – and yet seeing the 20 paintings together in the gallery, it is as if Tibbetts is asking us to contemplate what lies both beneath the mask and under the skin.

The work in Visages was completed in 2003 and includes work from Tibbett’s 2004 five week residency in Nimes France where she did research at the Nimes Media Center.

Since earning the MFA in 1998 Tibbetts has shown her work in galleries throughout the Northeast, including a solo exhibition at the Northfield Mt. Herman School’s Main Gallery and a group exhibition at the Karen Sprague Cultural Center at American International College. Tibbetts has also taught art at a number of Massachusetts and Vermont institutions, including the University of Massachusetts and Greenfield Community College.

Visages will be open at Hampden Gallery Tuesday, April 6 - Sunday, April 25. Opening Reception April 18 from 2-5 pm