Scraps, Stories, and Second Chances: How Bibby Gignilliat Reclaimed Her Creative Life
A California artist who once left art behind, Bibby Gignilliat now builds layered, joyful works from found objects—and from the fragments of her own journey.
“Each day as I step into my studio, I enter a playground.”
In Bibby Gignilliat’s Sausalito studio, the walls practically hum with energy. Collaged scraps of billboard posters, faded road signs, old love letters, pages from childhood notebooks—they lean, stack, overlap. It’s part archive, part treasure hunt, part playground.
And that’s exactly what she calls it.
“My studio is a playground,” she says. “It’s a place for taking risks, letting go of attachments, experimenting with new ideas.”
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time, not so long ago, when the studio didn’t exist. When her creative voice had gone silent. When, like so many of us, she had tucked away the thing she loved most as a child, folding it beneath the weight of adult life, responsibility, and someone else’s opinion.
But the art never stopped calling. And eventually, she answered.
“If you want to know what you should do in life, look at what you loved as a child.”
By the time she was ten, Gignilliat was already taking art classes, pouring her young heart onto paper. Then came a moment that’s familiar—and painful—to many creatives: a teacher’s critique sharp enough to derail a dream. “I stopped painting,” she says simply.
In the years that followed, her creative spark found other outlets. She became a computer programmer. A bicycle tour leader. A marketing manager at Williams Sonoma. A culinary school graduate. Eventually, she founded Parties That Cook, a successful corporate cooking events company with locations in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and Portland.
On paper, it looked like she had it all. But something was missing.
“I was speaking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management,” she recalls, “and they referred to my company as a ‘lifestyle business.’ And it hit me—I’d lost my own lifestyle. I’d forgotten what I truly loved.”
What she loved was painting.
So she did something brave, and maybe a little radical: she sold the business, picked up a brush, and walked back toward the dream she’d left behind.
Learning to Paint Again—And Learning to Let Go
Starting over wasn’t easy.
When she enrolled in an art class at her Sausalito building—a former shipyard now filled with artists—she felt like a beginner again. “I was literally the worst one in the class,” she laughs, unapologetic. “But I have determination.”
Determination turned into daily practice. A studio rental. A stubborn refusal to quit, even when she felt like an imposter. “I kept working at it,” she says. “Ten years later, here I am.”
Today, her richly layered mixed media works have been exhibited at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco, the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, and are represented nationally, including by the Portland Art Gallery in Maine.
Her process? It’s as intuitive as it is deliberate.
“I never know who’s in charge—my art or me,” she says. “The process is alchemical, magical, joyful. The maverick in me is encouraged. The perfectionist? She gets a time-out.”
Each piece begins with texture: layers of paint, paper, and found materials. “A childhood letter to the tooth fairy, a billboard scrap from Mexico City, a One Way road sign—they all make their way in,” she says. “They’re reflections of my interior life.”
She builds, covers, peels back. Adds, subtracts. And through it all, practices non-attachment.
“The whole point in art for me is to work on my non-attachment,” she explains. “I put down, I let go. I cover something up, then I bring it back—or maybe I don’t.”
It’s a philosophy borrowed from The Untethered Soul, and one she’s trying to bring into life beyond the canvas. “We can cling so hard to control,” she says. “But sometimes you just have to surrender. Trust the process.”
“Everybody is creative. It’s just a matter of how you express it.”
Teaching is another throughline in Gignilliat’s story.
For 20 years, she taught cooking classes. Today, she teaches art, both in-person and through online courses that have attracted more than 1,500 students worldwide.
Her goal? To be the teacher she never had.
“I want to be the antithesis of that teacher who shut down my little spirit at age 10,” she says. “I create a safe space for people to explore. For many, it’s like a homecoming.”
She understands that not everyone learns the same way—a lesson shaped, in part, by a Myers-Briggs personality test she once took as a cooking instructor. “I realized I had to flex my style to reach different people,” she explains. “Some students need exact instructions. Others need freedom to experiment. I meet them where they are.”
Her students—many of them returning to art after long absences—often bring personal mementos to incorporate into their work: love letters, family recipes, handwritten notes. “People ask if I make copies first,” she says. “No. I let them go. It’s part of the process of releasing.”
Scavenging Stories
Gignilliat’s work is filled with scraps and stories: billboard fragments from Barcelona, torn posters from Mexico City, street litter from New York.
“I was in Mexico City once, in the Roma Norte district,” she recounts. “I found a boarded-up building covered in peeling posters. I tore them down, rolled them up, left clothes behind so I’d have space in my suitcase.”
That haul became fifteen new pieces. Several sold at Portland Art Gallery.
Another time, she spotted a mound of discarded billboard paper in a rainy San Francisco alley. “I picked it up and brought it back to my office, dripping wet,” she says. Her staff stared in disbelief. “But I still have those scraps—and one’s in a totem on the gallery wall today.”
Even scavenging has its surprises. “I once found a cigarette butt on my kitchen floor,” she says. “Turns out, it hitchhiked home with my stash from New York.”
Totems and Transformation
Totems have become a signature form for Gignilliat.
“I love what totems represent—a connection to something higher than ourselves,” she explains. “They came naturally to me.”
When she first introduced them at Portland Art Gallery, she predicted they’d be a hit. “I told Kevin they’d be one of my top-selling pieces,” she says, grinning. “He wasn’t sure. But they sold really well.”
The vertical works combine her signature layers: street typography, billboard scraps, jelly prints she creates in her studio. She’s even launched an online totem workshop, with hundreds of students joining to learn the form.
“Totems feel spiritual to me,” she says. “They’re like visual prayers.”
A Bridge Between Coasts
Though based on the West Coast, Gignilliat feels a strong connection to Maine.
“Sausalito feels a lot like Portland,” she says. “Maybe it’s the water. Or the creative energy. But people here resonate with my work.”
Her art seems to travel the country in both directions. “There’s a joke that collectors in Maine buy my work and ship it back to California,” she says, laughing.
But no matter where the pieces land, each one carries something personal, something layered, something let go.
And for Gignilliat, that’s the point.
“I’m just so honored to be part of the Portland Art Gallery,” she says. “It’s a dream I carried for so long.”
Visit the Portland Art Gallery to see more of Bibby Gignilliat’s work.
Watch the full conversation on Radio Maine with Dr. Lisa Belisle.
