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BIO
Statement
There are matters which are beyond the capability of words. Painting is language & it is no easy task to develop one’s own distinct personal language.
My work has drawn comparisons to the collage work of Picasso and George Braque, the work of Robert Rauschenberg, as well as that of the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters. Of these, I feel more intellectually aligned with Rauschenberg and Schwitters. Rauschenberg because of his boundary-blurring use of materials and techniques was considered “neo-Dadaist”. Schwitters, of course, was a member of the original highly intellectual, avant-garde Dada movement, which was radical in its opposition to the political and cultural status quo of its time. These Artists rejected cultural and intellectual conformity and embraced what they referred to as “anti-art”.
Although I believe my work is somewhat stylistically different than these individuals, I embrace their philosophical and intellectual positions wholeheartedly.
I am radical in thought, principle & belief. Most of the great Artists in history were.
“Pablo Picasso and George Braque are credited with being among the first modern Western artists to use the collage technique, in their Cubist works beginning about 1912. Newspaper print, wallpaper, oil cloth, rope and sand were among the many materials that worked their way into the pioneering Cubist artists’ highly intellectual work. From about 1915 and continuing into the 1920s the members of the Dada movement used these collage techniques more intuitively and even anarchistically. The German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters borrowed the idea of collage from the Cubists and used the detritus of the modern world, materials totally alien to the orthodox cannon of traditional art materials, in his collaged, “assemblaged” works.
Charlotte, NC artist Gregory Gibson has created a body of work strongly influenced by the early collages of the Cubists and Schwitters as well as the works of the American artist Robert Rauschenberg."
------ Analogy, Meaning & Religious Experiences In Contemporary Abstract Art -
Terrence E. Dempsey, SJ, MOCRA, St. Louis Univ., St. Louis, MO
“Gregory Gibson gathers fragments of image and text together to question the meaning of each. Ecce Signum [“Behold the Sign”] is a paint-slathered collage of cardboard, wallpaper, newsprint, advertisement, and a reproduction of Albrecht Dürer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which is an illustration of one of the visions of St. John recorded in the sixth chapter of the book of Revelation. Each of these items is a sign in its own right: signifiers of commercial culture, the world of events, art, and scripture. Gibson implies that the sacred threatens to manifest itself in the profane world, in the refuse and the chance configurations of remnants. Images, objects, and scraps of rubbish form a modern hermetic script that proclaims the advent of a spiritual order that begins with the end of time.”
------ Religion In The Context Of Art - David Morgan Ph.D., MOCRA, St. Louis Univ., St. Louis, MO
Selected Quotations
Thought provoking words from individuals who have altered the course of history & inform my thinking.
* Updated periodically.
Pablo Picasso
“What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, the passionate, or the delightful things that happen in the world....No, Painting is not done to decorate apartments....It is an instrument of war.”
Maximilien Robespierre
"Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible;
it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country."
Vincent Van Gogh
"Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion."
JOB 1: 6-7
"Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them. And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."
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