Dream Houses

By Greg Thomas, 21.08.2023

Carole Gibbons monograph cover courtesy of 5b.

This revelatory new book brings together a selection of works by the long-overlooked Glasgow-based painter Carole Gibbons (b. 1935), of whom the not-so-overlooked Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray once remarked: “no collection, no show of modern Scottish art is complete without [her] work" . A selection of Gibbons' work is currently being exhibited at Celine Gallery in Glasgow, which remains open by appointment until 2 September.

Born in 1935 in Glasgow, Gibbons' formative early experiences, according to artist Lucy Stein’s essay in the new volume, include wartime evacuation to the Highlands and a period of childhood separation from her mother—who, we later learn, spent time in psychiatric hospital. Accepted to Glasgow School of Art in the late 1950s, Gibbons became a peer of Gray and other denizens of the city’s post-war art scene, including the abstract painter Douglas Abercrombie, and her partner Alan Fletcher (1930-58). Fletcher’s premature death is one of a series of tragic events peppering Gibbons’ biography. These, Stein notes, appear not as themes in her work so much as infusions of composition and mood. “Anxiety is a significant element in Carole’s opus. Sometimes it is disciplined into taught equine grace, at others the dissolving boundaries of her cherished domestic objects suggest psychosis.” An equally important influence was a period living in Spain in the 1960s, whose sultry Mediterranean landscapes and Moorish architecture gave external shape to some of Gibbons’ invocations of myth and reverie.

Stein proposes a three-part structure to Gibbons’ career, moving from “early mythopoeic landscapes” to the “domestic still lifes and oxytocin-induced portraits...of the middle period,” to the “dark still lifes” of recent years, “that verge so close to abstraction that objects become obstacles.” The first section would presumably include paintings such as ‘Persephone’ (1968), a sinuous fantasy landscape picked out in startling pinks and powder blues and populated by strange beasts and gods. Another early oil, ‘Elegy’ (1967), is described by its artist as “loosely a portrait of my mother as a goddess figure.” The subject is depicted front-on from the chest up, a flower adorning her breast, on which also appears a geometric modernist lapel or necklace. A curiously manic green pattern forms an arc behind her back, while the expressive content of her face is obscured by the brushstrokes used to depict it: blocky daubs of pale ochre, with a yellow mouth curled down at one side.

According to Stein, Elegy was “made at a time of great distress,” after the artist’s return from her Spanish sojourn – following the death of her father – whereupon she found her studio ransacked and artworks stolen. The unknowability of this divine mother-figure suggests, by implication, a sense of loss or yearning in the artist. There is an interesting section in Stein’s essay which describes Gibbons as “adamantly not an Expressionist.” This seems to say more about the artist’s adamant desire not to be pigeonholed as the potential relevance of such a term to pieces like these, with their emotive use of colour and strong sense of channelling or sublimating an inner life through outward forms.

Moving forwards in time, we sense a working through of the post-Impressionist influences Gibbons draws closer attention to when discussing her oeuvre. The bold-blue background and chunky pinks and reds of ‘Still Life with Blue Chair’ (1972) are Cloissoniste in feel – while curiously reminiscent of some of Margot Sandeman’s still lifes – while the painterly mark-making of ‘Cornflowers, Shell, Stone Head’ (1974) and ‘Easel, Book and Bed’ (1976) is Van Gogh-esque. A later work, ‘Old Byre Sheds, Finnieston’ (1992) alludes to Cezanne’s Provence rooftops, diagonal edges gently nudging at unity of perspective. Works on paper from the 1980s-90s (those just mentioned are all oils) include sketches of the artist’s son Henry, of horses and cats (both recurring motifs), and of friends and companions. An easy mastery of bodies and faces is evident here, the colour palette often occupying a threshold between naturalism and surreal intensity.

The title of a 1996-98 oil painting, ‘Still Life into Landscape’, suggests one way of interpreting the more recent, “dark still lifes” that Stein describes. Indeed, the work’s constituent objects no longer seem to occupy a domestic interior but to emerge from a sultry haze of layered blacks, oranges, and blues: more dreamscape than landscape. The effect is similar to last year’s ‘Untitled (Large Still Life)’ (2022), while vibrant pinks return in other pieces in the same idiom, like the oil and pastel ‘Still Life, Pink Bowl and Fruit’, (c.1996–98). Spanish memories haunt ‘Carafe and Chair’ (1992–96), with its jaunty Ionic column and Mediterranean-veranda feel. Other later oils revive the expressionist colour palette of the 1960s, like the stunning ‘Self-Portrait with Muse’, in which the orange-masked subject and imperious feline seem like the gatekeepers of some otherworldly kingdom, and ‘Horse in Landscape’ (1987), with its magnificent, swanlike sweep of equine neck, emerging from a patchwork of blues, greens, and reds.

Though points of analogy for Gibbons’s work abound, there is a singularity to her mature style that is hard to pin down, as Andrew Cranston notes in an introductory text. “What can I say? What can be said? The paintings speak for themselves. Should I proceed like Wittgenstein, and say what we can say clearly and pass over in silence those parts that we can’t speak of? Well, no—because then you miss the good stuff, the mystery of what keeps us looking at paintings and how they work on us, their magic.” The time to revel in the magic of Carole Gibbons’s art has come.

 

The monograph, along with a catalogue of numerous other publications, can be purchased from the 5B website here.