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This much might be taken as the obvious or the readily apparent when the ‘figure’ is present. Surely a charge enters any figurative work, most of all when the possessor is an attractive human being, and no less does it do so in Gibson’s work. What I wish to close by pointing out is this. The same charge flows from each of Gibson’s paintings. The ‘figure’ is an implicit presence, though more often it’s specific representation will be absent. So is present that sense of ‘invitation’ into a particular, personal world. Perhaps it is all of our worlds, in one. Edgar Degas, to me, spoke to us of the outwardly palpable shape of things, of appearances deftly swept into his artist’s stroke. David Gibson brings us completely inside the spaces which any form must contain. Necessarily, implicitly, insistently. As are the strokes with which he brings us to the surface. Bob Tyson
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The placement of pastel pigment fills these places with a multitude of shades, overflowing the breaks in the floor and the imperfections in the walls. Additionally, the rigidity of space is overcome by the vigorous movement of lines, and by a clever sleight of hand that the painter employs to the point that the onlooker feels himself to be an integral part of the painting. The use of many viewpoints and of paintings within paintings means that our gaze, dispite seeming to be trapped, always escapes toward other places, or even to the refection of the place represented. An archaeologist of light and of signs of living, David Gibson pushes the limits of drawing beyond the boundaries of our imagination. His paintings have a certain quality that is puzzling and which calls into question the supposed emptiness of space..... Rémi Turgeon
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One of the most beautifully honest things I have read in a statement from an artist is here (in a personal statement by Mr. Gibson that accompanied his show): "At the beginning, these (drawings) began from a desire for another easily accessible landscape..." (in other words, the subjects were there, and he took them, which is nice) "...and they developed into an examination of the subject: the beauty of changing color and light in this crumbling urban landscape...The more I pursued it, the more I became obsessed with the constantly changing skies, the majestic decaying buildings, the water towers, the chimneys, the derelict structures looming in the dense fog and under intense winter skies. So I approached this subject matter with mixed feelings (to put it mildly), and grew to love it." The result of this persistence, thought, and effort are these pieces. And what a wonderful, honest thing to say for a change! What he says in his statement is that he picked the subject matter for his work arbitrarily. It was there. And he gradually found out that it could have meaning and could be an extension of him. David Gibson has accepted his facility and is not torturing that facility as many really gifted, facile people do. He is not hiding it, and he is not overlarding or overlaying it with intellectual conceits and contrivances to keep all of us saying, "Gee, he's a wonderful draftsman, but his work is about nothing." And it is very often the truth that technical skill amounts to nothing, because skill is not equivalent to art at all. Skill has to be transformed by a vision that is distinct from that skill and that sometimes renders skill unnecessary and sometimes amplifies it,or sometimes makes it for skill even to exist. Skill plays a smaller part in art than most people think. Mr. Gibson has accepted his facility and by accepting it without devices and without torturing it, he has used it as a means of inquiringm of searching for a possible subject, and the pursuit of that subject gives his work meaning. You notice how gloriously he says in his own statement what I have been trying to say. He takes his art out of his will and out of his intent. Thank God he's honest enough to do that! He gives his skill the lie by transcending it and allowing it to be a vehicle to pursue the life of the subject that at first he did not identify or recognize. That's a big and a wonderful concession, and it's to be seen in his work! Most other drawings of tis sort, with their handling of light and their talk about color, are hogwash, but in Gibson's hand they are not. His work is honest and it's true, and it will go elsewhere. Harry Bouras, WFMT (radio) |
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My rosetta stones among Gibson’s pastel paintings are the ones that include the human figure. These are a minority, and they do not necessarily need to be taken out of context, nor assigned higher value than any others. What I note in them is that the immediate ‘identity’ of a ‘person’ who appears makes certain shadowy tensions come directly to the surface. Take the "He's Getting Me Red" interior with the hunched-over form of a woman in the nearer ground. Something here demands of my eye that it begin and end its journey through the painting with the regions that stand for this young woman’s head. Not only is it a 'fair likeness' and not only is she, in Gibson’s representation, so appealing a figure — there is the whole illusory space he has created around her and throughout all of the enormous space of the painting. This is 'personal' space of David Gibson, into which you and I are invited, or perhaps wished — to enter. Gibson manages a delicate balance also, in which the figure, despite its apparent fleshly specificity, also hovers in the painting-space de-embodied somehow, less an ordinary flesh-and-blood mortal and more like a mythic being we yearn to adore. 
...Beyond the mere study of form and space, the result of careful and intense observation, and reminiscent of certain paintings of Giacometti, David Gibson's pastels capture something more than the materiality of these spaces. Perhaps it is because he knows them so well that he is able to call on his experiences in them to depict them in a completely different way.
Mr. Gibson is a perfectly wonderful draftsman. He thinks in terms of line. He does roof-tops, he does landscapes, he does cityscapes. He does old buildings and wall-sides, and he does the various things on the roofs, the diagonals of the fire-escapes and the like. Yes, you've seen all of these things, and you've seen a lot of them. But he celebrates this incredible sense of line-----over and over again. His are standard drawings; they are wonderful drawings, but Mr. Gibson imbues them with something else because he is positively crazy about the synonymous functions of line and light.