Ramsay Gibb

In vigorous pursuit still of subjects in the far North for his sixth one-man exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery, the Scottish painter Ramsay Gibb has broadened the scope of his travels in Viking waters to explore the north-west coast of Greenland. He has also returned to probe deeper into the lakes and forests of Karelia in Finland. Back in his native Scotland he has relished extreme weather on Rannoch Moor and at Glencoe in the Highlands. In the limestone dales of Yorkshire he has walked the Three Peaks and in Lancashire painted in the Forest of Bowland, now his home after being based for many years on the coast of East Anglia.

At Ilulissat in New Greenland Ramsay Gibb felt he had come the closest so far to locating the mythical land of Ultima Thule, the home of icebergs which in the Arctic summer spread out from the fjords in a low light which dazzles without illuminating.  Here is indeed, that quintessential North which Gibb finds so compelling, located ‘somewhere beyond normal life, a new experience where the elements compete unhindered by any intervention from man, a rhythm of the ascendance of one element over another stretching far back into time… In among the vast spaces and forces float great volumes of frozen water, alien craft in a dark sea. Huge yet temporary, floating sphinxes, fortresses, pyramids, mountains, wild extravagant modernist creations, elaborate gothic cathedrals, fluted classical details… These icebergs seem to draw their form from every source, both crude and delicate so that one can never tire of them.’
 
In profoundest contrast to the drama of icebergs exploding noisily in the warming sun off the Greenland coast, Gibb found in the endless forests of Finland a great silence, ‘where almost no wind troubles the foliage, the lake waters are still, nothing seems to move except the slow tracking of the sun low in the sky.’  In Russia, where he travelled the length of the Volga and Don rivers, Gibb found the vastness of this unfolding landscape, level and featureless, almost disorienting. As reflected in the experience of the indigenous ‘Wanderer’ painters who first took it as their subject, the impact of this open landscape comes more from unexpected effects of light than from its topography.

On home territory, Gibb found subjects to his taste on the moors of Bowland Forest’s fell country, a forest only in name, crossed by a track going back to Roman times offering long views on to quietly dramatic open spaces, carpeted by a surprising variety of textures, grasses, heather, peat bogs, just the kind of lively foreground Gibb favours. Here, as in the Scottish Highlands, it is not unusual for cloud clusters, trapped between fells, to develop into a cauldron, generating wild weather which hurtles around the valley’s rim, without being able to tear itself free.

By way of respite, a tranquil episode far removed from the elemental dramas of wild seas, bare rock, extreme weather is introduced with paintings from the Malvern Hills and from Hushinish in the Western Isles, where a solitary cairn, almost the only man-made feature in the entire span of these paintings, stands out in solitary profile against an expansive overview of bays and headlands, a symbol or marker perhaps of the artist’s emotional attachment to this place.

In another time and with a different agenda Ramsay Gibb might be viewed as a painter reaching out for the ‘sublime’. His vision of the north becomes an analogue for states of mind, in contradistinction to the ‘picturesque’ which painters of the south found in the profusion of familiar motifs and architectonic unity of the Mediterranean world. But Gibb’s vision has an altogether harder, contemporary edge. His focus is on our changing environment, nowhere more fragile than among the glaciers and icebergs of the north. In this vision he joins with another artist from a very different tradition, Caspar David Friedrich, the painter of Sea of Ice, for whom landscape enshrined an essential moral dimension, a lesson to be learned.

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 at Bolton and then at the University of Brighton. From 1985 he based himself on the Sussex coast, finding subjects in the landscape encompassed by the rivers Adur, Ouse and Cuckmere. In 1998 he moved to East Anglia, drawn to the rivers, coastline and woodlands of Norfolk and Suffolk, with a sympathy for the region's archaeology manifest in surviving traces of early occupation and agricultural activity. In recent years Gibb has become increasingly interested in exploring his Scottish roots, favouring subjects on the West Coast, with a particular predilection for the islands, along with a growing fascination for the North, the seas once dominated by the Vikings.

Since 1994 Ramsay Gibb has been represented by 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 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. Since 2003 he has been exploring aspects of the northern seas, making working visits to the Outer Hebrides, the Shetland Islands, the Faroes, the Lofoten Islands, Finland and the Barents Sea. One-person exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery in 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006 and 2008.

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