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| Artist Resume 2011 | |
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| Biography | |
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Biography  Steve Gibson has been an avid artist since age five. His extensive artistic exploration of the next fifty-plus years has resulted in a large and multi-faceted body of work. Gibson’s early work was informed by studying and interpreting, over several decades, the works of the masters of many schools of art. Immersing himself in the Impressionists, Japanese art, and calligraphy, he attended the School of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the early 1960s. His paintings from that period were awarded Best of Show in student competitions for the Delaware Valley held at Beaver College (now Acadia University) near Philadelphia. While at Georgetown University, where he received a B.S. in Languages and Linguistics, Gibson spent considerable time in the galleries of Washington, D.C.'s many museums. In 1968, he set off for Europe to study the collections of the great art institutions of Paris, Florence, Rome and throughout Spain, where he studied Art and Philosophy at the University of Madrid. His studio was a block from the Prado Museum, allowing extensive study of the techniques of Velasquez, Goya and El Greco. In 1970, Gibson traveled to Latin America where his work was included in group shows with international artists at an exhibit on Isla de la Juventud, Cuba. His studies brought him to Cambridge, MA, where he set up his easel at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, again copying masterpieces, this time by Matisse, Cezanne and Degas. Having garnered a solid base of formal training, Gibson had the confidence in his craft to begin bending and breaking traditional rules. It was at this point that he felt his artist's soul emerge. Gibson enrolled at Massachusetts College of Art, receiving Honors in Painting. Between 1974 and 1978, his work was represented in group and individual shows in Boston and throughout New England. Early figurative and commissioned works earned him a modest reputation as a portraitist and figure painter in the 1970s. His work from this period has been compared to DeKooning for its use of distortions, grids, sophisticated color theory, and layered media to transmit temperature and shades of meaning. |