{"id":47767,"date":"2019-10-22T11:05:34","date_gmt":"2019-10-22T17:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=47767"},"modified":"2019-11-11T12:52:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T18:52:38","slug":"megan-gibbons-powerfully-simple-voyagers-enjoy-the-sea-air-at-phillips-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/megan-gibbons-powerfully-simple-voyagers-enjoy-the-sea-air-at-phillips-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Megan Gibbons’ Powerfully Simple Voyagers Enjoy the Sea Air"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Bridge”<\/p><\/div>\n

A jewelry display by Kristie Krumbach (bracelets, earrings) glowing center-stage beneath the halogen at Phillips Gallery is a perfect counterpoint to the paintings of women by Megan Gibbons: not a one of the several lone women in the latter’s large oils on canvas is wearing a ring. Or a bracelet. Or necklace. Or earrings. One, possibly, holds on to a seaside hat.<\/h4>\n

Each woman painted by the former Californian has a classic Now, Voyager<\/em> look, as if, like Bette Davis in her broad, beribboned hat,\u00a0contemplating a life-changing cruise. Unburdened by handbags, friends, dining companions, children \u2014 even without jewelry \u2013 they each have reached the self-declarative-goddess look of fashion illustrations of old \u2014 sketches of tall thin women wearing dramatic, expensive, elegant garments in large-city newspaper ads; women who looked brim-full or Bette Davis-full of what is now called agency <\/em>(new code word for self-determination, self-power: the sea-goer cool).<\/h4>\n

Contributing to this seagoing look are Gibbons\u2019 long painted horizontal strands in some paintings\u2019 backgrounds: cool blues and greens suggesting islands, harbors, piers. Even when her figures are in chairs, somehow they still look outdoors, on deck. Simple garments and no adornment may also definitely be this agile painter\u2019s way of expressing human figure with as little interruption as possible; and to avoid nudity \u2014 historically a male artist\u2019s invasive and almost harem-claiming territory (also a warning statement from men, through the centuries, that art is, and would be kept, a men\u2019 club.)<\/h4>\n

An ability to draw or paint feet and hands well is what separates, as they used to say, the men from the boys<\/em> among sketchers, painters. But Megan Gibbons has no lack of adeptness; she paints and draws feet and hands and the whole body inventively, fearlessly, using abstracted shapes which most artists might never guess would work to convey muscles or bones beneath skin, but expertly do.\u00a0Hands, crossed in \u201cCeleste,\u201d leaning onto a railing in \u201cHoop and Arrow,\u201d or supporting a model as naturally as if on sand in \u201cRetire,\u201d are worth paying attention to in these paintings. Feet, also, in Gibbons\u2019 paintings, are particular wonders: insteps so languorously extended they become beautifully stretched out<\/em>steps; toe boxes, ankles, calves, shinbones rendered so expressively you know why her models are lucky to be shoeless.<\/h4>\n
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“Retire”<\/p><\/div>\n

Her models\u2019 clothes are plain, almost childish, exuding a ballet-practice simplicity, necklines gently or deeply rounded, scooped. (Simplicity, they say, is elegance.) Each model\u2019s hair is upswept or held tautly in a bun, classic ballerina style to expose line of neck and shoulders, the whole body\u2019s gestural line. <\/em>This simplicity allows the focus to be on the body. But your impression toe to head is these models\/women look like authors, actresses, artists: thinking, brooding women. These women look at least as intellectual as sexual. (If only some of these models could be beyond child-bearing years; that would be fine to see.)<\/h4>\n

But especially because these women are young, Emily Fox King\u2019s huge floral paintings surrounding them are a harmonious, supportive accord of where women this age are in life, that high-flowering stage, settled into romances, and, possibly, mothering more than a mate. King\u2019s paintings of flowers are painterly riots; her titles, like \u201cFruits of Labor\u201d and \u201cPractice Makes Better\u201d and \u201cAll the Beauty You Will Ever Need\u201d and \u201cTime Immemorial,\u201d are reminders of fertility, beauty, and biological clock. The bright, modern, stylistic flowers, pale-brilliant and shadowless, are throwing themselves at the viewer or at space, and are contrasting with deep shadowing of figures of Gibbons\u2019 paintings.<\/h4>\n

Each woman, really, seems to be in conversation \u2014 with shadow. Shadow darkens to blackness almost half of the painted women\u2019s figures. Shadow, not just their downcast or blinking-into-distance eyes, convinces you each woman is deep in thought, thinking of something much bigger than herself, in the dark and light of meditation, introspection, arrangement of thought.<\/h4>\n