JONATHAN GIBBS

MEET THE ARTIST

Jonathan Gibbs studied at the Central School of Art & Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He is programme director in Illustration at the University of Edinburgh.

Gibbs’ work explores abstract form, colour, observational drawing, book illustration, and printmaking. Much of his imagery expresses aspects of landscape, the natural world and architectural structures. Animals, birds, and fish occasionally populate Gibb’s pictures, although the paintings tend towards more abstract or evocative representation. Although he has lived and worked in Scotland for a number of years, he acknowledges the importance of the churches, fields, shorelines and elements of landscape from East Norfolk, where his family comes from.  At first sight, his paintings and engravings evoke a mid-twentieth-century mood, fastidious, linear and deeply sensitive to place

Gibbs makes some of his own boxwood blocks, into which images are engraved and imprinted by hand onto Japanese paper by burnishing with a bone spoon.

As an illustrator Gibbs has worked with various publishers and design agencies. Commissions extend from narrative-based pictures for poetry, letterheads & bookplates, journalism and prose. He devises pattern designs for paper and fabric, in which capacity he has worked with St Jude’s, Norfolk and the Curwen Gallery, London.

In all of these endeavours Jonathan Gibbs greatly enjoys a synthesis of studio practice, collaborative art & design and the world of academia.