Christel Ibsen: Harbour Heights’ Very Own International Artist

“My paintings evolve from working in the creative fields of photography and filmmaking, both of which serve as important tools for my canvasses.

As a photographer, my camera allows me to freeze time itself.  Framing my subject, I wait for the split second image that I seek to catch.

When painting, my time is transformed into an endless space of color and hues, and it seems as if I enfold a part of nature into myself.

Filmmaking involves the magic of the moving image where sound and shape are interrelated. It is a complicated interplay of creative inputs.

Painting is solitary. It deepens my sight and allows me to expand a motif into my own vision.

I still marvel at how I first started to paint and how there are always silver linings in the clouds that sometimes seem to obstruct my path.

Twenty years ago, I suddenly began to lose my hearing. From leading a productive, exciting but frazzled life …. shuttling between Paris, New York and London …. within a few years I had become so deaf that I could barely communicate with my loved ones.

And that is when I started to paint….

With the silence of deafness came peace and the blissful ability to concentrate on the senses still left.

Since then, because of bilateral cochlear implants I have miraculously been given back the ability to hear and again to communicate through sound.

But painting remains my release, my pleasure …. a vocation that found me.”

Christel Ibsen, Denmark-born artist and part-time resident at Harbour Heights is best known for her realist-style portraits of children and almost abstract seascapes. Her work is represented and sold in 11 countries around the world, including here in the Cayman Islands. She is one of the ongoing featured artists at the Grand Cayman Ritz Carlton, where her works are currently hanging. Her paintings will also be in a new exhibition at the Ritz beginning mid-November, 2015.

Visit Christel online here: http://www.christelibsen.com/ and find her on facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/christel.ibsen