Biography

Ramsay Gibb was born in Irvine, Ayrshire in 1965, spending his early years on the coast near Troon. Later his family moved to Lancashire, where he studied first in Bolton and then at the University of Brighton. From 1985 he based himself on the Sussex coast, finding congenial subjects in the landscape encompassed by the rivers Adur, Ouse and Cuckmere. In 1998 he moved to East Anglia, where he has been painting the rivers, coastline and woodlands of Norfolk and Suffolk.

Since 1994 Ramsay Gibb has been represented by the Francis Kyle Gallery, participating first in the Jazz exhibition (1995), a project for which he travelled to the Mississippi Delta to interpret in watercolour a sequence of classic settings, urban as well as rural. Subsequently, he was a major participant in the Gallery's exhibition devoted to forests: Per una selva oscura - artists take to the forest (1995). From 1995 onwards he has worked mainly in oils, contributing in 1997 to The Saxon Shore, a portrait of East Anglia in the perspective of history and in 2006 to Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and His World by twenty-five painters today. One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004.

Ramsay Gibb

The Scottish painter Ramsay Gibb has painted, over the course of five exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery, subjects from as far a field as the Faroes to the Tundra country on the Russian-Norwegian border by the Barents Sea to the Scottish Hebrides, then southwards to the Aran Islands off the western Irish coast. Gibb has often followed the sea-routes of the Vikings, viewing his chosen subjects, appropriately, from the sea. 'Only in such a way,' he comments, 'could I achieve the fullest understanding of just how much at the mercy of water and clouds these lands are, as indeed I was myself.'

'The idea,' Ramsay Gibb notes, 'is for me one of purity and sometimes stillness: of open, untouched, truly wild landscapes which may offer an escape from the limitations of our industrialised and over-exploited surroundings.'

'We have got used,' he observes, 'to seeing our natural surroundings as tamed, softened, modified, hidden even behind our own fragile creations. Here, on the contrary, all is raw, untameable, free, which for me gives this landscape of the far North an almost moral dimension.'

A strong feature of Gibb's approach to landscape has always been his distinctive handling of light - typically a low, raking light often shining from directly ahead, silhouetting most of his subject in contre-jour. Effects such as these work all the more dramatically when they are seized from Gibb's unusually low angle, as close as can be to the surface of the ground, whether rock or earth.

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