2023

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2023 paintings

Index of paintings by Stephen Gibb

2023 paintings

What is painting and why do I paint

To understand the object as a symbol the viewer must disengage from the object and penetrate beyond its visual representation to extract its significance from the volumes of connotation held within. To say a picture is worth a thousand words is to impose a limitation on its potential.

What my paintings offer is a chance for the viewer to construct their own narrative based on the connotations and associations they may derive from the imagery, regardless of my motivations for painting it.

Understand, there are no dugs involved and no psychedelic experimentation. Along with my natural neurological makeup, I have conditioned my mind to think in a way that allows bizarre connections and associations to combine with seemingly disparate objects — all coming together with meaning and signification.

Stephen Gibb lives and works in southern Ontario, Canada. He earned a B.F.A. in visual arts from the University of Windsor and is currently represented by the St. Germain gallery in Toronto. Among the cities he has exhibited in are San Diego, Sacramento, and Hollywood— the hotbed of California’s Lowbrow and Pop Surrealism community. His work is collected around the globe and has gained widening interest since working on the album art for hip hop artist Trippie Redd.

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Psychopathology of Wants and Needs – Pop surrealism painting by Canadian Artist Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2022

This painting started off a few light years away from where it ended up. The original concept was to do something around the theme of “bliss”, examining the things that bring us to this occasionally visited state of mind.

I envisioned a head absorbing the things around it, which would have been things that evoke the state of bliss in people. The head became a skull, full of holes because it just seemed like a cool idea. I think sometimes the things that people seek to attain their blissful state can also be deadly and I liked the “ultimate conclusion” commentary by including the skull, acknowledging it as the final destination of bliss and of life.

Everything I came up with just seemed lame after that. So, I thought I’d explore the foundations of why we seek bliss. It occurred to me that maybe there was something in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that could give some insight into the concept.

This is where I abandoned the whole bliss theme.

Instead, I focused on representations of “needs” in my typical left-field approach, bubblegum surrealism style. A trivialized representation of food (sustenance) became a pie, which I doubled back on, posing the pie in the act of replicating himself…rolling out some dough for a crust. Reproduction is on the lower level on Maslow’s hierarchy and is represented by the pie and the gooey union of the two lolly pops, who produce offspring at the point of their sticky embrace. The progeny then takes an ironic bite out of the parent in an act of defiance and rebellion — the normal function of a teenager (LOL). At the far right a figure looks at his fingers as they produce offspring, which appear to just be fodder for the crow standing nearby (the circle of life).

The figure on the far right also represents clothing, shelter, property, security, which are lower, basic requirements according to Maslow.

The sleeping potato symbolizes, sleep, air and water — also basic needs, in spite of the absurdity of the situation.

As we move upward the needs become more abstract and less material. The two lollies could represent love, intimacy, family and connection, whereas the green lolly’s floating-away crown touches on the area Maslow characterized as “esteem”, the realm of status, recognition and self-esteem, things I think our society puts too much stock in. As well we put absurd value on wants versus needs and a title was suggested to me — The Psychopathology of Need and Wants.

At the right side of the mountain is Sisyphus as an ape, pushing a large brain up the incline, symbolizing evolution, strength and the struggle to raise the “required needs” to the pinnacle of the hierarchy, which is represented by the pyramid man at the top, radiating out to embrace everything in his “blissful” state of self-actualization. - Artist Stephen Gibb, Nov., 2022

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Froze—by Canadian painter Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 36″, oil on panel, 2020

FROZE by Canadian painter Stephen Gibb

The balance between survival and our relation with the environment is a give and take negotiation at its simplest state. Depletion, plunder and by-products that result from our “processing” of resources are ways in which we impact the equilibrium. The responsible thing to do is minimized the negative legacy in favour of a renewable, sustainable outcome. Yet humans seem more adept at exploitation for greed and profit and waste is an inconvenient factor in the equation.
The emissions and pollution, the sewage and trash management of large cities is evidence of our excesses and ignorance. These were considerations that guided my painting “Froze”.

Reducing the composition to four basic characters, I focussed on the mood and the atmosphere of the painting more than a reliance on the narrative chaos that I typically rely on in my work. The frozen world above is giving way to the melting world below as the two central figures huddle for warmth and sustenance in a situation that is ironically contributing to their imminent peril. Just as human society has created the system of resource exploitation that is contributing to global warming and climate change, so do the central figures in the painting. The catch-22 created by the need for warmth for survival is also melting the ice, hastening their demise, as the voracious devil-like figure waits for his dinner below.

The fragile balance of life is often illuminated by taking an alternate perspective, and just as often it is obscured by ambiguity.

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Vengeful Wrath of the Chocolate Gods — 36″ x 24″, oil on panel

The vengeful god in the clouds is nothing new and most often is used in pop culture for humourous effect. It’s really an absurd notion—an angry god? So what could be more absurd than a god of chocolate? In ancient times (maybe even today) there were beliefs that sustained polytheism where a multitude of gods each have distinct functions—the god of the sea, the god of fire, the god of love. Why not a god of chocolate? I love chocolate and why shouldn’t it have its own deity lording over the domain of chocolate land.

The rest of the painting is just silly aspects of chocolate experiencing their chocolate reality—living, dying, being consumed and generally enjoying their chocolatyness.

This got me thinking about the creative process and how some simple prompt can lead you into depths unexplored. People often ask me where my ideas come from and through my grinding teeth I try to answer cordially. Thoughts, that’s all they are. Thoughts that get turned into images and recorded in oil paint—endless thoughts swirling all around you waiting to be plucked and converted into something wonderful.

Brian Eno had a system of cards called the Oblique Strategy cards he formulated with Peter Schmidt that essentially were simple thoughts or instructions designed to help promote creativity. I had been collecting a series of thoughts and when I discovered Eno’s cards, realized I was doing the same thing.

Although they could be construed as motivational in tone, if they are accessed during a point of creative stagnation, they may jump-start the creativity process back into high gear.

Here are my creativity-booster phrases. Pick one at random. Think of them as instructions to open your creative block — or Hallmark Cards from the Twilight Zone:

Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

Strip away the pre-supposed dignity of art

Celebrate the genius of the audience

Disrupt the universe in your own special way

Art is a veil of obfuscation hiding a prize

Rattle your mental cage and awaken the sleeping philosopher within

Defy the gravity of consciousness

Make art to be photographed and studied later

Challenge yourself with something counter-intuitive

Meditate on you idiosyncrasies

Hold the colour in your mind’s eye

Release yourself of fear by trapping it in your art

Look at clichés from different angles

Revisit a repressed thought

Contemplate the perspective of the art viewing the audience

Mine your soul for a gem to share

Loose yourself in the math of composition

Take the most obvious solution and do the opposite

Bask in the glow of the viewer’s confusion

Consider the chemistry of the brain

Hide something in plain sight

Portray the human side of evil

Invent your own dichotomy

Redirect in response to the last thing you created

Reach through the curtain of time and touch your younger self on the shoulder

Label an emotion that does not yet exist

Let the viewer know that you are watching

Make the art self-aware

Engineer tension

Set traps on the way to the most obvious conclusion

Derail a preconception

Expose a subtle notion with flamboyance

Direct attention to absurdity

Conceal a secret within the content

Distil the uncanny essence of ugliness

Pose a question and leave it hanging

Shine the light on an open-ended conclusion

Fearlessly diminish the precious

Invert the sacred and profane

Investigate a theme that terrifies you

Mock yourself

Listen closely to music that irritates you

Construct 10 answers to the question “Why?”

Let something random dictate direction

Abandon your gimmick

Create as if you are an abstractionist—if you are an abstractionist try surrealism

Look at the pure joy of futility

A childhood game is waiting to be rediscovered

Consider two outcomes and flip a coin

Make an imperfection a focal point

Share a memory of extreme profundity

Dare to confront your inner fool

Invent your own version of reality

Travel one second back in time

Stretch the rules just to the breaking point and let go

Try on a point of view in conflict with your own

Ask yourself a question and don’t answer back

Reduce your complexity to cave-dweller basics

View yourself from 100 years in the future

Sum up your process to a phantom biographer

Tell yourself it doesn’t really matter and is not that important

Let a ghost direct your hand

Contradict your present state of mind

Plan on taking one step forward and two steps back

Ponder the noise and listen for a message

Reflect on all the people you have encountered

Recall an idea you forgot that you forgot about

Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

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Surrealism Famous For Stimulating Creativity

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Saatchi Art featuring Canadian artist Stephen Gibb

St. Germain Gallery: Featuring Stephen Gibb

Surrealism
シュルレアリスム

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While pondering a fun house setting for a painting, I became aware that the whole reason for a fun house is to artificially induce fear in the patron. It became clear that fear or phobias would then become the central theme to the painting. Taking a smattering of common phobias and integrating them into my surreal art, here is the result:

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

Meditation on how fear shapes our lives

Fear fills us with anxiety.
It makes us avoid situations and it can make us seek out situations.
It forces us to overpay for things we don’t need.
It urges us buy cheap knockoffs.
It suffocates us in our inadequacies.
It erodes our status and drives our aspirations.
It ruins relationships and drowns us in paranoia.
It stokes the fires of jealousy.
It keeps us guarded and incapable of contact.
It waits for us at night.
It hides at the bus stop, dark alley, and foreboding basement.
It lurks behind the strangers face.
It slinks in the shadows of the unknown.
It watches us as we sleep.
It shows us what is wrong with the world.
It crushes us with what we see in ourselves.
It contaminates every uncertainty.
It rationalizes our irrationality.
It confuses our affirmations.
It makes us doubt the truth.
It dumbs us down and puffs us up.
It lies out loud and inside our heads.
It guides our thoughts and haunts our dreams.
It disrupts the peace with blunt force.
It looms like a dark cloud above us.
It screams on the dark pier of surreal art.
It is chronic and unrelenting.
It removes our calm and unsettles the waters.
It hints at the onset of madness.
It overthrows the balance.
It leads us to the edge.
It threatens us with doom.
It grips us like the icy hands of death.

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Words that follow me around like wilful shadows, playfully darting about in the periphery of my mind’s eye. Until something better comes along I guess I will reluctantly tolerate them (even if “surrealism art” makes me grind my teeth). I won’t let them define me but I will let them rattle around in their container until they can somehow break free.

To me, labels like this are like subtle haunts. Lurking just at the perimeter of thought’s reach, within the range of off-stage prompts and directions, barely at the threshold of awareness. More like faded scar tissue than an emblazoned crest worn proudly, labels and brands are like familiar clichés. They convey a message in basic, familiar terms but may not be very accurate. Yet what is their impact? Does the label beget the art?

I often wonder about people whose work becomes bigger than themselves and if their “brand” then, in turn, informs their decisions. Or does the creator deny the influence of past success (or suppress it) to the point where the delusion is that we are not co-dependant of our previous creations. I don’t know, but sometimes I think about things like this.

Every once in a while I take on a project that just seems like an exercise in biting off more than I can chew. It’s a way of testing the walls of my container or maybe redefining the limits.

“The Empty Visual Discourse of a Reluctant Pop Surrealist” — Stephen Gibb, 42″ x 48″, oil on panel, 2019

With the painting “The Empty Visual Discourse of a Reluctant Pop Surrealist” 42″ x 48″, oil on panel, 2019, I attempted one of the largest painting I’ve ever done while stuffing it with content relevant to the themes of consumerism and emptiness. Originally conceived as a “proposed” painting for an exhibit (which I was consequently rejected from) it continues a commentary so prevalent in my body of work that it could almost be regarded as an “exemplary” Stephen Gibb painting.

Starting with the underlying, hidden decay at the top, which is concealed by the artifice of the commercial world of marketing, advertising and product, the painting illustrates the “consumer” in a feeding frenzy, consuming the last drops of what is available to him. Like some kind of fantastical digestive tract we follow the course of the consumption into the hollow container below, where motifs of “emptiness” echo the nature of the unfulfilling consumer/marketer contract—the unsatisfying delivery of what was promised.

Just as a label promises a certain expectation it can often under-deliver. The final irony being that my painting under-delivered to the curator of the exhibit, and was thus rejected. Funny how life imitates art…

I’m an artist not a writer, so feast on the art and let me eat my words.

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Crossing the lines between the supernatural, the unexplained and the realm of science that is just “weird” offers up a rich visual spectrum of possibilities for a painting.

Spooky Action at Close Proximity — Stephen Gibb, 36″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2019

Taking straight-forward connections to magic words like magic 8-ball, magic mushroom, magic carpet, magic eye (vacuum tube), and combining them with tools of magicians and alchemists becomes a jumbled image of loosely associated items and characters.

Items like a tarot card, crystal ball, evil eye, ouroboros, an infinity symbol, gold, lead (pencil), cups, sword (dagger), coin, wand and voodoo doll all add to the mystical symbols that historically are linked to the performing of magic.

The coloured balls represent the four elements—earth, air, fire, water, while the left-hand-side hand represents black magic and the right white magic.

Science as magic is represented by Einstein’s theory of relativity, as he watches the baby traversing the sky in an arch, arriving as a corpse on the opposite side. Instead of a rabbit coming out of the hat we have a pair of rabbit-ears (TV antenna) which echoes the technology represented by the cathode tube, the egg-yolk light bulb and electric arc.

Is a surreal artist supposed to access their unfiltered subconscious or can their work be informed by content and concepts pulled from language and assembled in a compelling composition? Andre Breton would argue in favour of the former. I will defend my preference for the latter and let my painting act as support to my argument. Whatever side of the surreal fence you find yourself on, it all boils down to your own personal preference and willingness to accept that good things come in all sorts of packages.

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