Caldwell Snyder is excited to announce an exhibition of John Gibson’s recent works in our St. Helena Gallery. Please join us to meet the artist, and enjoy an evening full of art, wine and music.

Born in Northampton, MA, John Gibson has focused exclusively on the shape of the ball for over forty years, using it as a tool for exploring the space of painting. Often decorated with a minimal pattern to emphasize its illusory curvature in space, he uses his subject to comment on the elusive goal of depicting life in a way that captures and approximates, but never quite aligns with, three-dimensional reality.

The tension between flat and dimensional space has always been central to painting; in a sense, the history of painting is the story of its engagement with this concept, from the invention of perspective to the breakthrough of cubism, which fused the two, to the flattening of the picture plane in modern abstract painting.

Gibson’s patterned spheres allude to this history while at the same time retaining their integrity as basic objects—an interplay of opposing forces: flatness and roundness, lightness and darkness, simplicity and complexity. Sue Miller, best-selling American novelist and owner of a Gibson painting, noted that “there’s an enormous tension, in this seemingly light-hearted painting, and the mind doesn’t tire of trying to work through it somehow, revising it endlessly, imaginatively, attempting to resolve the conundrum John has created—all the while relishing the close observation which that attempt demands.”