From the Studio: Carole Gibbons & Christian Noelle Charles

By Susan Mansfield, 08.12.2021

Carole Gibbons, Untitled, c. 1969. Gouache on card. Courtesy the Artist and From the Studio.

Recent years have brought a welcome resurgence of interest in the work of Carole Gibbons, who has lived and painted in Glasgow since the 1950s, regardless of whether the art world paid her much heed. Graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1957, she refused to train as an art teacher - the usual way forward artists at the time - preferring to make her way as a professional painter.

Her work, which is unlike anything else in Scotland I know of, was well received in the 1960s and 1970s, and was bought by a number of public collections. In 1975 she became the first woman to have a solo show at the Third Eye Centre. As interest in painting waned, she slipped from view, but now, in her eighties, is being rediscovered by a younger generation of artists. 

Here, she is the focus in this winter group show by Glasgow-based From The Studio, which offers a rare chance to see a group of her paintings, drawings and prints from the last five decades. The star, without question, is the large untitled painting, still wet when it arrived in the gallery, which she has been working on and reworking, as is her practice, in the last few years.

Highly textured, with colours and shapes layered in oil paint and pastel, it sits somewhere between still life and abstraction, though the long format suggests there is an element of landscape too. Like much of Gibbons’ work there is a density and liveliness of colour, an exuberant palette of greens, pinks, lilacs and oranges.

Ode to the Aegean Night is a still life in saturated blues and turquoise. She paints and draws the view from her Glasgow window variously in oranges and greens, or blues and pinks. There is a playful pink cat, and a superb watercolour still life from 1998 which manages to combine the translucence of the medium with a glorious depth of colour.

An early interest in mythology gives way in her later work to a focus on interiors, still lifes and a lexicon of personal symbolism, woven together in a painterly stream of consciousness. She seems to work instinctively, between abstraction and representation, concerned with the act of painting itself as much as with any subject matter.

In this show, she is featured next to another woman artist, two generations younger, Christian Noelle Charles, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art’s MFA course who, in an interesting parallel, had a solo show at the CCA (successor to the Third Eye) earlier this year.

Charles also works in performance, and these pieces - an accomplished combination of spraypaint, silkscreen and monoprint, capture movement and physical expression. She calls them 'selfies', but they are much more than their title suggests, multi-layered and beautiful, installed in mirrored frames which seem to suggest further multifarious possibilities.

 

From the Studio Winter Show with Carole Gibbons & Christian Noelle Charles, Studio Pavillion, House for an Art Lover, ended November 28.