After the Rain 2 Painting

Charles Gibbons is an abstract painter from Toronto, Canada whose work has developed steadily for some 25 years. Today he is one of the finest -- albeit a relatively unknown painter of his generation.

Charles Gibbons subscribe to the movement of self-styled independent painters who rejects many of the prevalent trends in contemporary art such as cultural criticism and questioning of gender and identity. Painters who work with a confidence merely in the value and autonomy of aesthetic experience, and they are not afraid to explore their own souls. Charles, like the others in the movement, uses custom-made acrylics, reflective paints and advanced gels.

His manner is unique and immediately recognizable. His paintings have an untidy air, yet with a sense of control and deliberateness. They belong to the tradition of all over painting, with roots in the analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque, and more recently with Jackson Pollock, Jules Olitski, and the Larry Poons of the '70s and '80s. They offer a kind of dishevelled cubism, as though the elements of painting, brush strokes, scrapes, and spatters -- had somehow collapsed into place, but their structure remains firmly in place, like a natural stone wall.

Gibbons has his own way with colour. It isn't a matter of one kind of colour, although it exploits primary colours. Saturated hues tend to be set up and then cancelled or muted by close-valued neutrals. His colour seems never to come straight from the paint box, yet seems invariably right for each picture. A jazz musician once remarked that Count Basie had an uncanny ability to pick the right tempos; Gibbons seems to have a similar gift for the right colours: they never call attention to themselves, but always fit the picture.

His formats consist primarily of traditional squarish rectangles (which tend to be somewhat cubist in orientation) and long, horizontal rectangles. In the first, the horizontal and vertical coordinates tend to imply a grid upon which the painting falls into place. In the second, the rectangle itself maintains surface tension, allowing a more casual organization, often exploiting a repeated diagonal motif. Despite these general characteristics, each of Gibbons paintings insists and succeeds on its own terms.
Charles Gibbons was born in Montreal, Quebec, and now lives in Toronto, Ontario. He has earned degrees in architecture, philosophy, art and business.