New Business Model

If you're reading this email, you're going to learn a lot more about a certain side of my life, the part that really matters to me. For years I've been leading a double or even triple existence, and it's been a hard path to tread. I've been trying to be all things to all people.

I've been a curator of exhibitions, and a dealer for art historical ephemera connected to the legacy of my father's art gallery from the Sixties through the Nineties. I've also tried my hand at career coaching, which has included studio based critiques, artist statement workshops, and gallery tours and introductions. Yet what I really care about is writing. I call it "contextual analysis" because it's not really my intent to tear anyone down or put them in a corner. What I want to do is help them to be seen and to be understood. I've been writing about art and for artists for most of my career. I feel that my insights into their work and their mindset have benefited from past career experiences. I see them on all levels. Here are a few examples:

Leah Oates has over time expressed a single concept, of the impermanence of her subject despite every effort to have it formally bestilled. Despite the popularity and abundance of means of creating digital images, Oates’ works are achieved via traditional analog means as creative interpretations and experimentation with the physical material of film itself. This allows her to maintain both a technical skill and creative authority that rest on their own laurels. (from The Transitory Instinct, July 2023)

The body issues that animate Joseba Eskubi’s work confront the historical concept of the Grotesque, which is posited as the opposite of Classical beauty. It takes its influence from darkness rather than illumination, from sexual passion rather than idealized bodies originating in Classical antiquity—which were in themselves a mode of hiding passions of men for men. Myth or history realized pictorially has often served to obscure the darker passions of humankind. The use of the grotesque is, in this regard, the more honest of the two options, as it presents the unadorned bent of a degraded nature without the trappings of epic tales in which to clothe it. A grotesque figure in and of itself has a specific type of truth to tell, and though it is not traditionally beautiful, it may deliver a potent example of both character and agency. (from The Resistant Reflection, April 2022)

Sokol Kramer creates psychologically loaded spaces in small works. The admixture of images sampled and drawn, the projective quality of the images, and a way of pushing them together to use negative space and create visual tension. They work best when depicting a single figure or the view of a single face, though singularity has nothing to do with the effect she achieves. It’s prismatic, creating tangent reflections, like the abstracted faces out of early Cubism. One has to gaze at the whole while allowing the parts to move the eye back and forth, rhythmically, until the manifested details emerge into an image, or an idea of one. There may never be a resulting image, but the impressions she makes are strong. Many of the parts she uses to build her scenes, figures, and faces are part of an emotional register that connects to beauty and body issues from her childhood and adolescence. We focus on these aspects of our appearance and they soon become signs or symbols of who we are. As we age, they change as well, but the memories of these events well up. They remain etched in our character. (from The Prismatic and Manic Collage Rhythms of Bernice Sokol Kramer, December 2021)

My writing is about other creative individuals, but it's also who I am. I am a writer who cares deeply about his subjects, and about the discipline of writing, for its potential to reveal important truths. Consider me as a source for "contextual analysis" as a service to your own creative practice, or for any artist whom you may represent or collect. View my writer's resume on my website and my recent and forthcoming writings on my email newsletter webpage, The Other Side of the Desk.

Sincerely

David Gibson