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Jeff Gambill Studio      
                                                                                                                                                                            
                                                                                                                                    

...out of the corner of my eye...

My paintings have always begun from personal experiences and my current work continues that approach.  However, in my recent work the personal is kept much more at a distance; identifiable imagery and narrative is less emphasized.  In these works the personal sources of my imagery are kept mostly to myself and only the barest hints, the most ambiguous suggestions of subject are to be found.  So, while these paintings find their beginnings in the familiar inspirations I have used before- memories of places, people or moments from my life, they retain little of those original sources and concentrate instead on the abstract elements that evolve as I work in the studio.  I have always been interested in depicting things that are difficult to capture, such as a fading memory or something seen in a reflection in a window.  These things can be quite intangible, like something seen out of the corner of my eye.  How do you translate these things into paint?  In my paintings I have pursued this by seeking out the indefinite place between abstraction and representation, a place that I have found to be very natural and fertile for me.

It seems that as I have been emphasizing the abstract in my work my paintings have become increasingly meditative.  You might say the paintings are frequently about “painter’s moments,” those moments in the studio when you are thrilled simply by the physical characteristics of paint, like a border that forms when two fields of color push against each other, or the contrast between a solid surface and a wash next to it, or how a small line scratched from the wet paint with my fingernail might make the surface come alive.  In recent years I have made a very conscious effort to work with varying painterly methods within a body of work, often within a single painting.  So in my paintings you will see pouring, printing, drawing, glazing, finger-painting, illusionistic modeling, and so on.  While this approach may seemingly result in works that are unrelated in appearance (in fact, I find amusement in the knowledge that some will assume the paintings have been made by different artists!), I believe that when a viewer looks carefully they will find solid relationships between the paintings, as well as numerous characteristics that have been consistent in my work throughout my career.

Jeff Gambill

2007

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