Still Life – Sweetheart

Jonathan Gibbs shows a series of prints from a variety of wood blocks, most recently engraved into Birch and Holly. He has also made small boxwood blocks, originating from his garden in Humbie, East Lothian. Jonathan Gibbs makes wood engravings for exhibitions as well as working to commission in publishing and design. He studied at Lowestoft School of Art, the Central School of Art & Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He is a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.

Gibbs has exhibited widely in London and Edinburgh. He works in painting and drawing, as well as being an illustrator and printmaker. These disparate pursuits are unified in formal character, subject matter and aesthetic qualities of line and colour. His work is in various public collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, Scottish Arts Council and Government Art Collection, and many private collections.

Gibbs’s interest in printmaking grew out of sculpture and drawing, and he occasionally makes woodcut prints from larger pieces of timber. He studied painting for five years, but was also taught by Norman Ackroyd and Blair Hughes-Stanton, to name but two eminent printmakers amongst various part-time lecturers at the Central and Slade schools.

As a graphic artist, Gibbs has illustrated poetry by Robert Frost, Janet Paisley, Tom Pow, and Alice Oswald. However, his recent commissions have focused upon landscape and environmental themes, to illustrate texts by Mark Cocker, Richard Mabey, and Robert Macfarlane. In addition to literature and poetry, Gibbs has also made wood engravings for the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Royal Opera House, the National Trust and he has designed letter-heads, book-plates and logotypes.

A foundation of drawing underlies all of this work, and Jonathan Gibbs greatly enjoys the synthesis of fine and applied arts in his studio practice.