Published Comments

REGIONALISM ( LANDSCAPE STUDIES OF SOUTHERN ONTARIO)

"Landscape painting seems an inadequate term for Catherine Gibbon’s work. Many people associate the term with bucolic countryside scenes. In contrast, Gibbon’s pieces are infused with a living, magical quality, and a dramatic narrative that transcends human presence."

Anya Wassenberg

"Her art embodies both regionalism and environmentalism She was the driving force behind ON THE EDGE, an art environment project that forced attention on the value of this regions’ natural environments. In the show called "Unnatural Landscape" she continues to explore the delicate relationship between humans and nature through familiar views and events.

Regina Haggo, Hamilton Spectator

HAGERSVILLE TIRE FIRE SERIES (SERIES)

"Gibbon’s firefighters are ghostly anonymous figures, but as they toil amid the molten rubber and blinding smoke we remember that they are fathers, neighbours, brothers, sisters- volunteer firefighters who left jobs and families to tame the blaze. in Gibbon studies every brushstroke, scuff and smudge speaks of this human element. Even the artist’s finger prints leave their mark, bringing an intimacy to this human and heroic side of the story.

Laura Arseneau ArtsBeat, February/March 1999 re "Unnatural Landscape" Grimsby Public Art Gallery

"Images of the Tire Fire in Hagersville are not polemical, rather a visual poetry eliciting both emotional and aesthetic responses to the work, its subject matter an exploration of catastrophe and a catalyst for environmental responsibility."

Margaret Rodgers, Exhibition catalogue, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington

‘Her style throughout these paintings is what you might call opulent, The great billowing clouds of smoke and the giant yawning canyon walls of bright flame are so dramatic , so visually powerful that one is put in mind of the Bible and/or Cecil B DeMille. .. At one level the fire and the context are a metaphor for what we have done to the environment, and perhaps it is a metaphor for hell itself. But this is so much more complex, even ambiguous than that - like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the fire is the most compelling character in the piece, the one we keep coming back to, the one we can’t stop looking at."

Jeff Mahoney, Hamilton Spectator- " Fire sparks magnificent paintings"

"Catherine Gibbon’s landscapes are places of transformation, a threshold between this world and some mysterious future which awes and inspires She reminds us that we are vulnerable and ultimately dependent on nature"

Deirdre Chisholm, Exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Grimsby

"Catherine Gibbon uses the painterly vocabulary of romantic landscape to demonstrate the rent that has opened in our relations with nature, producing ravishing spectacles of environmental degradation.

Robin Metcalfe, Halifax. "Public Order" exhibition catalogue. Art Gallery of Windsor

"Catherine Gibbon shows that convincing oil painting on a monumental scale is not a lost art. Her multi-image"Atmospheric Incidents" memorializes a disastrous industrial fire and its environmental effects. The paintings didactic power derives from its being a tour de force in truth to life"

Ann Arbour News, Michigan USA

FOREST FIRE SERIES

Nature’s Way is quite a contrast to Tom Thomson’s "Lone Pine". How the age of the pine has faired is a tragedy...deeply meaningful work."

P. Bradshaw, Prince George BC.

"Catherine Gibbon has captured the awesome beauty and violent destructive power of fire over nature. Surprisingly serene and disturbing at the same time."

Rob Zeer, artist, Prince George BC.

Gibbon’s imagery of forest fires, lightning and other natural phenomenon are so powerful that they strike one’s heart. Her large scale works allow us to glimpse a beauty in the power of these terrible events. But Gibbon’s works are about much more than the destruction and fear engendered by these events; they allow us to feel that everything is connected - nature and mankind.

Mandy Saile , Exhibition catalogue, WKP Kennedy Gallery, North Bay

SPECTRAL LIGHT (RECENT EXHIBITION )

"Sky dominated views that are filled with breathtaking colour...The factories smallness relative to the natural environment makes them look almost insignificant. Human accomplishment, symbolized by the buildings, seems to fade next to nature’s vastness and power.

Regina Haggo Hamilton Spectator re. "Spectral Light’. Gallery on the Bay, Hamilton

BLACK AND WHITE TREES (UPCOMING EXHIBITON)

"Stunningly stark series of tree drawings on black paper focus on the musculature and texture of the trunks to the extent of animation. They are strong and timeless like the great and lasting monuments to the glory of nature."

Garry Burns, Brantford Expositor