OBEN ABRIGHT
Oben Abright grew up in San Anselmo, California. The son of artists, he spent his early years drawing, painting and making clay sculpture in his parent’s studio. While still in high school he enrolled in drawing and painting classes at the College of Marin, where his father is head of the ceramics program. After graduation he traveled and studied at the Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute of Art of Florence. In January 2000 he began study at The California College of Arts in Oakland, CA where he studied drawing, painting, ceramic sculpture and glass blowing. He received his BFA in Glass in May of 2004 and lives and works in Oakland, California.
‘Since I was a child, I have been doing portraits. My work portrays what I see in the faces and experiences of specific people around me. Each portrait represents a personal relationship between the artist and subject. Life is so temporary, and each human face is so unique. Time changes them until they are gone, but the portrait remains timeless. I have always been fascinated with capturing life through art - the personalities of people beyond the gesture of the human form. I sculpt individuals with the goal of representing them with accuracy and compassion. Their visage is documented by my impression of them through sculpture. My subjects are people who exemplify the struggle of hope, poverty, loneliness, isolation, addiction, war, homelessness, love, and all the beautiful chaos of being alive in our time and place in this world.
As a figurative sculptor working in clay, I wanted to show more of the internal struggles behind the still face of a figure. Human emotion is a subject often hidden under our skin and behind our eyes. This desire to reveal the internal landscape of the human mind has led me to pursue the transparency of glass. A glass figure conveys the fragility of life and the luminous presence of a living being by trapping light and color refracted through the body of the subject.’
