Oil painter Janet Kipp Tribus (pronouced trib-you) has decided to come out of the kitchen and into the studio.
Tribus is not new to painting. A seasonal resident of Vero for a dozen years, Tribus has shown her award-winning work in exhibitions in her home state of New Jersey including a solo retrospective at the Morris Museum of Art. In Vero Beach, her paintings have hung in shows including “Our Very Own,” the well-attended private exhibition of artwork by John’s Island residents that Tribus has chaired for more than a decade.
Since 1984 she has created many commissioned works and sold her original paintings through her own studio and in retail venues, including the Admiralty Gallery in Vero Beach (she is no longer with the gallery).
Local couples who own Tribus’ work include the artist’s Johns Island friends and neighbors, whose names she ticks off with ease: Nancy and Dick Shumate, Randy and Sandy Rolf, Dottie and Jim Currie and Bill and Laura Frick.
When Tribus and her husband Don made Vero their permanent home two years ago, Tribus set her studio up in her kitchen.
“I had the easel on the other side of the island,” she said.
She had all her ingredients close at hand – canvases, oils, brushes. But something was missing.
“Just painting alone, it just works for a little while,” she says.
Self-motivation gets an artist only so far, Tribus explains.
“Every so often you have to try to get back into it again. It just was not the right fit for me.”
Fortunately two of her neighbors, artists Cindy Rounsavall and Kathy Kemp, told Tribus about Emily Tremml and her Palm House Gallery and Studio on Ocean Drive. Rounsevall and Kemp were already painting there, and knew it would be the right place for Tribus, too.
The gallery, located directly across the street from Costa d’Este Beach Resort, is on the second floor of a building that houses two street-level clothing shops. It is accessed by strolling through the open walkway in the center of the building and hanging a right at its end. There, a bougainvillea-twined stairway leads you to the gallery’s door.
Tribus planted her easel in the studio near the ocean-facing windows and got to work. That was a little over a year ago.
“I love being at the Palm House now, it’s given me a whole new lease on life,” she says. “I just love the people, I just feel like I’m being fed.”
The ready encouragement she receives from fellow Palm House artists-in-residence, including Rick Kelly, Suzy Mellott, Carol Frazier, Jan Taylor and Emily Tremml, induces Tribus to show up for work there for three or four hours every weekday.
Prior to coming to Vero, much of Tribus’ life was spent in New Jersey. As a child in the 1950s she lived in Montclair, where her father was an architect who designed houses. Her mother was a real estate broker for whom Tribus later worked as an adult.
“So I’ve got this house thing going in my life,” she says, referring to her continuing series of paintings in which simple house forms figure prominently.
Although Tribus drew as a girl, she didn’t begin again until 1981, when she picked up her pen to limn portraits of her Montclair neighbors’ homes.
The limitations of pen and ink line drawings soon made Tribus feel restless, and she decided to take a class at the Montclair Art Museum. Based on the exercises found in the Betty Edwards book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” the class “changed everything” for Tribus. She realized that she “just needed to be freer.”
The class challenged her preconceived notions about what a drawing should look like and how a drawing is made. Armed with her new knowledge, she decided she wanted to paint.
Newly married to Don Tribus, she was still uncertain of her artistic ability.
“Don knew. He always though I had talent,” she said.
With Don’s encouragement, Tribus commuted by bus to New York City to attend The Art Students League, where she studied from 1984 to 1986. Two of her influential teachers there were illustrator Earl Mayan and abstract painter Knox Martin Jr.
It was in the latter’s life painting class that Tribus found direction for her own style – when she least expected it.
Classes at the Art Students League are very crowded, she explains.
“If you don’t come in early enough, you get a bad spot – near the door. Then people are bumping by you all the time.”
One day she was working on a rather large, unwieldy canvas. Positioned at the back of the room, Tribus could barely see the model for the forest of easels in front of her.
“Sometimes anger is a good thing. I just said, ‘That’s it,’ ” she recalls.
Tribus turned her back on the model. She had enough of the figure on the canvas already that she decided to finish the painting from her imagination.
A study in pink, orange, gray and green, the painting shows the nude model seated at a table that holds a bunch of flowers in a vase. At the top of the composition Tribus included the hot electric lamp that illuminated the scene.
The result impressed Knox Martin, who told her, “You must always hold onto that painting. That is a watermark painting.”
She still owns that work.
Her earliest professional paintings included commissioned house portraits, but in the pictures she painted for herself, Tribus began to simplify her house forms to one elemental shape, like the houses in the board game Monopoly. Tribus places these shapes in imaginary landscapes inspired by the rolling countryside of New Jersey. A recurring motif in many of these scenes are girls in white-collared black dresses under red umbrellas.
Surely there is some symbolism going on here; as it turns out, it is religion-based. Tribus is a devout Christian.
“A lot of my work comes from my faith in God,” she says. “I really credit the Lord with my gift.”
While she says that she didn’t begin painting umbrellas with a specific meaning in mind, she now thinks of them as representing God’s protection.
As for the monopoly houses tumbling through the air in one series of paintings, like so many Kansas cottages uprooted by a tornado? Tribus refers to the Bible verse in which Jesus exhorts his followers not to be like a foolish man, who builds his house on shifting sand.
“Build your house on a firm foundation, otherwise you will be tossed and turned,” Tribus says, but adds, mischievously, that lately she has been thinking of her airborne houses as “going somewhere,” a good thing, she says.
