John Gibson

"Although I have painted balls exclusively for over 25 years, I don’t really care that much about them. Of course I’m attracted to them just like anybody else; I admire their endlessness and mystery. I love the way they can stand in for all sorts of unknowns and even the way a circle, or a shape of some kind sits on the surface of a ball and bends into space. But I don’t paint balls because of any of that, or because I think they have some significance or “meaning”. I paint balls because they are the most simple and fundamentally different thing from the flat surface of a painting that I can think of. I like that elegant opposition of forces. Every day I try to wring a “real” ball out of a flat surface and every day I can’t quite do it. In the good paintings there is some residue of that effort and in the best paintings there is a lot. In many ways then the subject of these paintings-at least for me- is just that residue: a wish for something that cannot be had, a version of a ball overlaid with desire." (Read more below)

John Gibson holds degrees from Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. Over the past 25 years he has taught painting, drawing, and printmaking at Smith College, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. Gibson’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the United States. His paintings and prints are held in numerous public, private, and corporate collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA Boston, the Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Smith College Museum of Art, among others.