We caught up with the brilliant and insightful B.C. Gilbert a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

B.C. , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to be an artist. The idea of pursuing it professionally probably didn’t occur to me at that age. I just thought it was something you did. I just know I have never not wanted to be an artist. I feel fortunate to find myself at mid-career still producing artwork.

B.C. , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was born and raised in Amarillo on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle. The geography there as well as the rich and colorful history of the area and
the individual characters it tends to produce has had a tremendous influence
on the art work I create.

As an artist I have not stuck to just one medium. For the first 20 years of my career, I focused primarily on mixed-media painting, watercolor pen and ink, and relief printing. For the last few years, I have shifted my focus to sculpture, both small and large scale. I have been building a body of work in order to help me pursue public art projects, both currently and for the future proposals. If there was enough time in the day for me to do it all, I would.

Even though I have a background in sculpture, it took me a few years to make the connections I needed to make in order to produce large scale sculpture. In the Spring of 2020 plans were discussed with me to create 4 large scale sculptures to be installed temporarily in Lubbock on a 2 year lease program with the Art Alliance there as well as TXDot. Of course, CoVid hit and put a halt to those plans which was in actuality a good thing because I didn’t have a studio to build these. While everything was shut down, I built a 20″ x 40″ sculpture studio in my backyard. which I didn’t have at the moment. In fact, Thankfully in late Fall 2020, things got back on track and I built the first two sculptures and installed them in August of 2021. When I returned home, I started the next two and installed them the next summer in 2022. This has been a pretty proud moment for me in my career because of the amount of planning and work that is involved something of this scale.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I think the most rewarding thing about being an artist is being able to do something that not everyone else can do and I’m not just referring to any sort of natural talent. In order to create an audience that appreciates and values your work, you have to put your art out there and be consistent about it. And if people like your work, that’s even better.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I take pride in not just being an artist, but being a producing artist. To me, if a person is truly an artist, they are always creating or thinking about the process. Studying art in college gave me the opportunity to create on a regular basis, even though initially it was for a grade. By the time I was nearing the end of my studies I had gotten in the habit of being continually productive whether it was for a grade or not. After my second year of graduate school, I took a leave of absence and found myself without the benefits that come with being a student such as a wood shop to build stretcher frames for painting. Instead, I worked a full time job as an industrial welder and starting noticing these 2′ x 2′ sheet metal that were stacked up on a pallet to be scrapped. One day I took one of these and during my lunch break cut a shape out and took it home and did a painting on it. I continued to do this for the next year before making the decision to return to graduate school and by the time I quit my job, I had several paintings.
I think this time period in my journey is a good example of resilience because even though I wasn’t a full time art student anymore, I found a way to produce that was accommodating to my current situation.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bcgilbert.com
• Instagram: @b.c.gilbert

Image Credits
Tonja Hagy-Valladine, sculptures