For over forty years, John Gibson has focused exclusively on the shape of the ball, using it as a tool for exploring the space of painting. Often decorated with a minimal pattern to emphasize its illusory curvature in space, he uses his subject to comment on the elusive goal of depicting life in a way that captures and approximates, but never quite aligns with, three-dimensional reality. The tension between flat and dimensional space has always been central to painting; in a sense, the history of painting is the story of its engagement with this concept, from the invention of perspective to the breakthrough of cubism, which fused the two, to the flattening of the picture plane in modern abstract painting. Gibson’s patterned spheres allude to this history while at the same time retaining their integrity as basic objects—an interplay of opposing forces: flatness and roundness, lightness and darkness, simplicity and complexity.

Sue Miller, best-selling American novelist and owner of a Gibson painting, noted that “there’s an enormous tension, in this seemingly light-hearted painting, and the mind doesn’t tire of trying to work through it somehow, revising it endlessly, imaginatively, attempting to resolve the conundrum John has created—al the while relishing the close observation which that attempt demands.” The resulting paintings seem to contain a powerful kind of potential energy, the spheres on the verge of rolling out of the composition and into reality. At the same time, they’re silent and still, restrained by the materiality of paint, the flatness of canvas. With subtly rich colors and finely balanced compositions, Gibson’s paintings project intelligence, grace, and a hint of mystery.


"An intense familiarity with my subject has allowed me to become truly intimate with it so that very small adjustments mean a great deal. Every single aspect of what I do now in the studio is crucial. The scale of a painting, for instance, is hugely important. A smaller painting becomes an object, an icon or a relic. Larger paintings become expansive and reference landscape. Large is a different desire, a different yearning from small.

There are so many more factors other than scale; red is a different state of mind, a different taste and feel from yellow. A long horizontal creates an entirely different rhythm from a square. Oil paint on panel is something different-means something different-from watercolor on paper. A brush mark is a world apart from one made with a roller or a knife.

I know each of these differences intimately so that when I decide in between paintings that it should be yellow and not blue then I’ve steered myself in a way that is, really, the work itself. Over a long period of time I have found that these decisions were making the work less anecdotal-less and less about balls really-and more of a way to satisfy some longing for form in general. Apparently it wasn’t a ball I was interested in as much as an experience of roundness itself, or emptiness, or black. The work has become sparer over time-leaner-and more essential.

Often times those changes occurred after a great deal of planning and thinking. I studied, for instance, Joseph Albers or Agnes Martin and decided that the yellow should wobble…or that there should be much more white. Other times change occurred less consciously. Sometimes after years of making paintings of single balls you walk into the studio and see multiples everywhere; piles and pairs and rows and you say: “Oh! So this is what I have become…damn…I didn’t even know”.

And then you start again from there." - John Gibson