Meet Me at the Last Tree Painting

"My art revolves around, transcends and invokes a sense of wonder within an ocean-nurtured lifestyle. Through the exploration of water landscapes, peoples faces and rural images, I free the boundaries of their realistic attributes. I open the dream-like qualities of moments revisited, thoughts recognized, and landscapes explored. There are many ways that I portray a subject, muted themes, political sarcasm, and disguised messages, developed through the application of painting, chemical, and textual techniques. Through the use of acrylic on panel I loosely apply the paint trying only to control the content, leaving the nature created waves of wood grain often exposed. The surf art, found object sculptures I create openly reinvent the energy of ocean waves and the way they move, form and break. I take an optimistic point of view trying to imagine surf everywhere and paying respect to the idea that wood gave us surfing. Much of my work reveals the relationships between energy, water, life and emotion and how those create and destroy our natural world specifically the ocean. Using art to document the environmental struggles of the times, the works relay a message. Through surrealistic symbolism, Byzantine inspired iconography, and hidden images, I invoke participation from the viewer with a visual, emotional, and cognitive experience." Splattering, dripping, and irreverent use of color evoke the gestural intensity and compositional dynamism of abstract expressionism, while Gibbs' sculptural use of environmental offerings and found objects is reminiscent of Rauschenberg's mixed-media combines from the late-1950s and early 1960s. And Gibbs' simplified, silhouetted forms and flat swaths of color that lend a contemplative serenity to many of his landscape paintings display a controlled and contemporary style all his own. Gibbs' comfortable traversal of stylistic boundaries parallels the extraordinary manner in which the artist plays with narration in his paintings and mixed-mediacompositions. His juxtaposition of words and images elicit the fleeting nature of experience and memory, and the artist's provocative pairings and use of symbolism allow Gibbs to exploit the ambiguity and subjectivity of meaning. Yet Gibbs is anything but cavalier about the messages he is trying to convey.