Painter and print maker Jonathan Gibbs: Artist Interview

We visit Jonny at his studio in East Lothian for an invaluable Q&A that covers influence, encouragement and simplicity.

Where does the picture making process start?

Every day I’m drawing, delighted with five new Faber Castell jumbo pencils - HB to 8B. Big graphite sticks too. I’m known in the commercial sphere as a print maker, but I’m a painter, too.

What have been some of your more enjoyable projects of late?

Difficult to say. Impossible to choose. But four new paintings for Godfrey and Watt in Harrogate this week and a book cover for Octopus last week, about Postal Paths. Also a website logotype for the North Norfolk Festival of Landscape and Literature.

Describe your workspace...

My studio has printing materials and presses, blocks and inks, books & guitars, a plans-chest. And there is a shed with open white space for drawing and painting at the top of the garden. If I were to transplant myself, Paris would be marvellous.

Are you able to describe your creative process? And how does it differ for you fine art versus commercial endeavours?

It starts as a visual idea, rather than a verbal one. Something seen in a dream state. For exhibition work I make sets of paintings - three or six, eight perhaps and drawings likewise, a poetic theme. Also, to make a series of wood engravings, currently hills, streams & rivers, pylons.

For commissions: pencil drawings, quick and fairly simple to show the composition, something to talk about with the person asking for the work. The crucial stage in those fertile collaborations with designers, writers and editors. Commercial illustration provides a great contrast to authorial projects. Indeed, I would not have thought to make some work about any of the particular subjects I have been given, a fascinating aspect of illustration. The unpredictable is something I enjoy very much.

To whom do you owe your creativity?

I do not know where on earth it comes from; a mystery. But I do owe everything to my parents who recognised early on that I wanted to be an artist and encouraged me to do it. Miss Doris Lamb was the art teacher at school from 7 to 13, she was entirely kind and knowledgeable, an extremely modest and humane teacher who gave complete encouragement and enabled me to be myself.

I was also inspired by books and music at home in my childhood and I remember good, framed reproductions of Van Gogh, Matisse, Gauguin and John Sell Cotman. Just a few pictures that I got to know really well from young age. Then I saw them in actuality when my mother took me up to London for the Tate and National Gallery. Extraordinary and amazing.

Tell us about some recent collaborations…

St Jude's, CIA, Fry and Open Eye galleries are excellent and enduring collaborations. Recently I have worked with Chris Hamer at the Rowley Gallery, which is to say making new works for London and meeting people there. Playing a few tunes with Jonny Hannah is excellent, always a joyful and inspiring collaboration.  We have exhibited together in group shows in the North and South which connects with film, music and poetry. I look forward to more of it.

How has your visual language evolved over the years?

My earlier work is more detailed, fine gradations of hatching. I have been striving towards simplicity.

It all developed out of printmaking, improvised and spontaneous cuts into strangely shaped pieces of boxwood. It came out of sculpture in stone and wood at school, then a Foundation course. But I went towards painting for BA and postgraduate, including a fair bit of printmaking. An extraordinary range of teachers of every artistic complexion.

To experience more of Jonny's work take a stroll through his folio here. 

 

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