Carole Gibbons may be the most famous artist you’ve never heard of. Now in her late eighties, the Glasgow-born painter racked up a flurry of successes between the 1960s and the 1980s, including major solo exhibitions (Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre in 1975); landmark group surveys (Edinburgh College of Art’s “Painters in Parallel,” 1978); and acquisitions by royals and national collections (National Galleries of Scotland, among others). She also won the support of high-profile figures, including art historian, curator, and critic Duncan Macmillan; gallerists Richard Demarco and Andrew Brown; artists John Bellany and Alasdair Gray; and the influential Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Douglas Hall. And then, nothing. Yet Gibbons persevered, continuing to develop an exceptional body of work. When asked in a 2021 interview how she defined success, she replied, “a good brushstroke.” In the past decade or so, though, largely thanks to those good brushstrokes and the efforts of a younger generation of curators as well as artists such as Andrew Cranston, Lucy Stein, and Gibbons’s son, Henry Gibbons Guy, her work is, tentatively, hopefully, once again attracting the attention this exhibition proves she deserves.
Last summer, a handful of paintings were showcased at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow, in a small but stunning display held to launch the artist’s first monograph (by publishers 5b). That exhibition acted as a teaser for Gibbons’s show at Céline, which featured six paintings spanning more than thirty years. Often teetering between abstraction and figuration, Gibbons’s work has shifted over the decades from mythological and folkloric subjects to more quotidian themes: interiors, cats, still lifes. But these categorizations are too easy; she finds epic, mythological qualities in ostensibly domestic subject matter (Green Cat, 1963, is more psychedelic Louis Wain than restful Elizabeth Blackadder) and a magic realism in her fabulous folkloric landscapes and figures, such as Chinese Horse, 1977, or Birth of Venus, 1969. In these, fantastic visions appear to be material, tangible parts of the world, as though such spectacles could be glimpsed from the window of a Highland cottage. But whatever their subject, her paintings share an outstanding feature: their use of color. Early ’70s works look resolutely contemporary as a result. In Goddess, 1972, a face appears in close-up, looming large from the frame. Set against an expansive orange background, clouds of pink hair crown a lilac face, a green-tinted chin and aqua blue neck are outlined in yellow, and eyes and mouth are messily rendered in purple—as if some film star had blurrily photobombed Vision After the Sermon, 1888, the great Gauguin housed in Edinburgh’s National Galleries of Scotland, pushing his pious Breton women to one side. Gibbons’s statement is bold, jarring, and discordant, and all the more captivating for it.
In 1978, Guardian and London Times critic Cordelia Oliver described Gibbons as “a poet who happens to paint, feeding through deeper-than-conscious roots in an effort to connect the soaring world of the imagination with the moist, basic comfort of mother earth.” Oliver was right: Through this small selection, Gibbons’s range, vision, and enduring talent are wholly evident. Her reverberating, resonant use of color, the bleeding edges between forms, and her makeshift decorated frames and dreamlike visions are the work of an exceptional, high-voltage artist.
