Jonathan Gibbs

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• Jonathan Gibbs

“Although Jonathan Gibbs has lived and worked in Scotland for a number of years, he acknowledges the importance of the ‘churches, fields, shorelines and elements of landscape from East Norfolk, where my family comes from’.  At first sight, his paintings and engravings evoke a mid-twentieth-century mood, suggestive of territory between Ben Nicholson and Eric Ravilious – fastidious, linear and deeply sensitive to place.

"When the art historian Nikolaus Pevsner summarised ‘the Englishness of English art’ for the Reith Lectures in 1955, he chose Hogarth, Reynolds, Perpendicular architecture, William Blake, John Constable and the Picturesque movement to exemplify different aspects of national character.  It is possible to use Pevsner’s categories as a way of reading Jonathan’s work.  The Hogarth lecture ends in an account of architectural ‘dressing up’ in different styles, which could correspond to Jonathan’s facility for evoking an earlier period.  ‘Reynolds and Detachment’ is the title of the second lecture, indicating a coolness and restraint.  Perpendicular is more a visual category, in which straight lines structure an ornamental and constructional language with light pouring in.  We might think of those Norfolk churches and their delicate linearity.

"Pevsner characterises Blake with ‘flaming line’.  As painter and engraver alike, Gibbs is certainly a man of line, and like Blake, he keeps shapes and objects afloat in space in his work.  Constable and the Picturesque I will lump together.  Here we are talking about sensitive provincialism of the kind that ploughs a furrow on the same relatively narrow patch, from which a universal sensitivity to nature grows visible.

"Is all this stuff about national character divisive rubbish, or is it one of several litmus papers that we can dip into art in order to begin to understand it?  Treat it if you like as a game that we can play with Jonathan’s delightful and resilient work, as his work plays with our memories of places and other works of art.”

Alan Powers – from the introduction to Flint & Straw, Works by Jonathan Gibbs at the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, 2006.

Jonathan studied at Central School of Art & Design, London, and at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London.  He was a Cheltenham Fellow in Painting at Gloucestershire College of Art, and was awarded a Boise Travel Scholarship.  He is presently Head of Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art.

Read more about Jonathan's wood engravings - Table Work.

Solo Exhibitions 
 

2024
Paintings From My Shed, Rowley Gallery, London
2018
To The Jade Emperors Mountain, Rowley Gallery, London
2016
Life Is But A Dream, Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
2015
Curwen Gallery, London
2013
Fish Bone, Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
2011, 2008, 2006, 2003, 1999, 1997, 1995, 1993, 1987
Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh
2001, 1998, 1991, 1989, 1987, 1985
Curwen Gallery, London
2000
Frames Contemporary Gallery, Perth
Ewan Mundy Fine Art, Glasgow
1990
Stroud Festival, Gloucestershire
1989
Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival
1985
Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
1982
369 Gallery, Edinburgh
Park Gallery, Cheltenham
1981
Holsworthy Gallery, London
1980
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
1979
Camden Arts Centre, London
Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh

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