Stephen Gibb » Humpty Dumpty

Canadian Artist Stephen Gibb – Laughing out loud

Stephen Gibb — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 21:20:12 +0000

Laughing all the way to the grave

Laughing in the Face of Death – Stephen Gibb, oil on panel, 2017

Laughing In The Face Of Death
The motivation behind this painting began with an observation. I was surprised at an art opening how dismissive the crowd was to the art on the surrounding walls, and how the party activity in the room was the real reason for the gathering. It irks me to think that all the thought and effort an artist puts into their work is so easily ignored and marginalized. Observe any exhibit and notice how quickly visitors will pass a painting, merely glancing sideways or feigning interest with the most cursory, peripheral review of the work. Of course not everything is going to be of interest to every one but…

Can’t be ignored
The idea struck me that maybe it was possible to paint something that can’t be ignored—something so bold, goofy, jarring, in-your-face that it demanded at least a 5 second pause before the viewer returned their gaze to their phone. That’s where the idea for the big, Laughing Man came from and why he dominates the painting. It’s like a goofy carnival head made of paper mâché that both playfully demands our attention and repulsively makes us squirm in its presence. It’s the draw to the scene, the magnet that pulls us into the setting and invites us to surrender to the narrative, both objectively and subjectively. My hope is that the viewer gets lost unravelling their thoughts in response to the guidance offered by the images. The Laughing Man at first glance seems benign and happy, but in the context of the painting there is a darker behaviour at play. One begins to see the mockery and ridicule in his face…

Sympathy for the Death Head
Death has traditionally been portrayed as the spectre of doom, something to be feared and avoided, not mocked or belittled. In this reversal of characterization, he becomes almost an object of sympathy, his rectus grin replaced by a “taken aback” expression, which seems all the more fitting. I love toying with these kinds of ambiguity, forcing the viewer to take sides as an active participant. The only hints I hand out are crumbs that lead the viewer in their own direction of exploration and comprehension.

On the Shoulders of Giants
The Shoulder Devil is often a symbol of the troubled conscience, the darker foil that in some yin yang balance counters that of the Shoulder Angel. As presented here, the Shoulder Angel should be the Laughing Man and since we have established that “he’s no angel”, then perhaps the devil is “no devil”. His expression echoes the disconcerted face of Death and the disarmed Shoulder Devil seems to be rendered impotent with his diminished scale overwhelmed by the presence of the Laughing Man.

What’s your Poison?
Death’s head again gets echoed in the poison’s skull and crossed bones symbol. The pernicious liquid dissipates in a threatening vapour, consistent with the theme of death on the left side of the painting. The Kool-Aid coloured liquid establishes a dichotomy of repulsion and attraction, drawing the viewer to its visual appeal and repelling them with its warning label.

Day of Reckoning
Like the Judgement card in the tarot deck, the graveyard is often the setting for the events of the Day of Reckoning, where the dead are held accountable for their earthly actions. The grave markers bear witness to the impending doom of the final days playing out on the left side of the painting with everything tilting toward one giant opened grave that Death merges with at the bottom corner.

Lunacy of the Cosmos
The cosmic forces at play in the upper portion of the painting represent the natural cataclysm looming over us each day. The Moon strains to spew out a giant fireball that nonchalantly plunges toward earth. Even if the Laughing Man has distracted Death, the indiscriminate forces of nature will finish his job for him.

Nail on the Head, Life in the Balance
I often use Humpty Dumpty in a way that makes him a placeholder for humanity. He is fragile and susceptible to the elements and situations that he finds himself in. He is the existential king of nursery rhymes and his daring and courage are reflected in the simplest of actions since his frail shell could fracture from the slightest bump. He ironically flails a hammer, but he hits the nail on the head—the head of Death. Like the last nail in the coffin, the final blow, he boldly attempts to finish off death.
His hideous grin repeats that of the Laughing Man and the cannibalistic fried egg in his left hand makes him less than a sympathetic character as well.

The Game of Life
On the far right is a pantomime of life, players rolling the dice and chance dictating the outcome. There is the power/class struggle, the leader being self absorbed in his own good fortune, oblivious to the ones left behind and the downtrodden lashing out in frustration. Sensory input is also left to chance as the game leads inevitably towards Death and the opened grave on the far left.

Return to main gallery

•••
Stephen Gibb and Canadian Art
As a Canadian artist, I feel like I must do my best to reach a Canadian audience. I hope this series of analytical explanations of my paintings helps broaden the awareness of my art in Canada and eventually beyond.

The post Canadian Artist Stephen Gibb – Laughing out loud appeared first on Stephen Gibb.

My obsession with Humpty Dumpty

Stephen Gibb — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 17:24:17 +0000

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again…*

My obsession with Humpty Dumpty is both visual philosophical in nature. I am drawn to the famous egg visually, through his numerous portrayals in children’s books. His ovoid shape and cephalic body create a disconcerting strangeness that is hard to forget. Often styled with an equally strange grimace his impact on impressionable children is assured. One of the more famous portrayals is that by John Tenniel in Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872). Tenniel’s version of Humpty Dumpty with his wide slit mouth and creepy arched brows has stuck with me and penetrated many of my own characters in my paintings.

Aside from being physically creepy Humpty is also an egg. Frail, vulnerable and awkward he becomes a perfect symbol for the existential human. We are in constant state of alert when it comes to self-preservation and safety, something Humpty took too lightly. I often insert Humpty into my paintings as a symbolic representation of myself. Sometime he is just included as a frail human witness participating in my jumbled scenarios. He becomes a sympathetic entity that the viewer can hopefully identify with.

Return to main gallery

* The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle. There are also various theories of an original “Humpty Dumpty”. One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930 and adopted by Robert Ripley, posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted as humpbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare’s play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485.

Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty was a “tortoise” siege engine, an armoured frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War. This was on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected. The theory was part of an anonymous series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes and was widely acclaimed in academia, but it was derided by others as “ingenuity for ingenuity’s sake” and declared to be a spoof. The link was nevertheless popularised by a children’s opera All the King’s Men by Richard Rodney Bennett, first performed in 1969.

From 1996, the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648. In 1648, Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground. The Royalists (or Cavaliers, “all the King’s men”) attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but the cannon was so heavy that “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again”. Author Albert Jack claimed in his 2008 book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes that there were two other verses supporting this claim. Elsewhere, he claimed to have found them in an “old dusty library, an even older book”, but did not state what the book was or where it was found. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century or of the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men. – source Wikipedia

The post My obsession with Humpty Dumpty appeared first on Stephen Gibb.

Canadian Pop Surrealism by painter Stephen Gibb

Stephen Gibb — Sat, 21 Mar 2015 23:45:42 +0000

Canadian Pop Surrealism

Return to main gallery

Dopamine

Here we go round the prickly apple at 5 o’clock in the morning – Stephen Gibb, oil on panel, 2017

“Fun House of Phobias” — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel 2019

Pictorial Puzzles for a Post-human Paleontologist

Keeping it Together, Walking on Eggshells” — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

Caught, by Stephen Gibb, oil on panel, 36″ x 24″, 2018

Last Days Of the Plague — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2020

Frog Prince at the Gates of Decay, painting by Canadian surrealist Stephen Gibb, 48″ x 36″, oil on panel, 2017

The reluctant clown candidate held aloft by blind zealots

Software and Clockworks

Revenge of the sycophant scorned

Happy cookie

Cheesy Dorito

Happy Peanut Butter

Freaky Donut

Self-absorbed Popsicle

Reese Peanut Butter Cup

All I want’s to be left on a block of ice

Sympathy for the Rat King

Spinning plates

Keeping mum in the presence of a toxic personality

If I blow your mind, what will you do for me?

Frantic preservation of essence in the face of imminent contamination

One bad apple

Maniacal menace of the culture colossus on auto pilot

Laughing my fool head off

The cannibal bubblegum’s sugary lust of hidden truths

Chicken and the egg

The emperor’s new confection

Heavy thoughts

With the promise of chocolate Humpty gets duped by the clockwork carrot

Oh, Crap!

Dark side of the flaming moon

Mastery of the social graces and the maladroit tea party

Carl sleeps and dreams of being forever Jung

The thief exploits a temporary lapse in security

The sourdough dolly and her salivating solid-door ally choose either salad or surreal cereal as Sir Eel and Salvador Dali look on

Krampus in the box

Last of the carnivorous unicorns

Darkness falls on the whitebread world

Stephen Gibb Artist Statement
(Or, at least a feeble attempt to excuse my behaviour to those present with good taste)
My artwork weaves an eclectic tapestry of cultural and social influences. At one moment it may make a
single-punch-line comment on pop culture while the next it may construct a complex and playful diorama
probing into the outer perimeters of human nature.
My work is often categorized as pop surrealism but I’d begrudgingly prefer to tag it as existential editorial
cartoon realism, just because it sounds more intelligent and funny at the same time. The work holds
a certain reverence and faithfulness to reality mimicry but leans away enough to fall in the shadow of the
“uncanny valley*”, the area where the mind is unsettled by what looks real enough but couldn’t possible
be. It is in this realm, theoretically, that the mind’s gamma waves are super-stimulated and brain activity
resembles fireworks. I resolve that this accounts for the broad reactions my work garners from observers,
that ranges from contemptuous dismissal to enthusiastic exuberance. We are all wired differently.
The medium is the method, which has been a faithful deployment of oil painting and traditional oil painting
techniques, such as glazing and the occasional dalliance into chiaroscuro. The richness achieved
by layers of thinned oil paint on MDF panels always adds an interesting luminous quality to the final
piece.
My direction as of late has been to devote more to composing on the panels rather than in pre-sketches.
I’m intrigued by the more spontaneous and gratifying results of ideas presenting themselves in the process
rather than in the planning, hence the falloff in the recent output of sketches. Often a core image or
concept dictates subliminally as to how the composition manifests itself.
see stephengibb.com for more

Stephen Gibb Canadian Surrealism

Stephen Gibb Canadian Pop Surrealism

The post Canadian Pop Surrealism by painter Stephen Gibb appeared first on Stephen Gibb.