Nature as art … wood, rivers, lines

Everything starts with a line as Jonathan Gibbs transforms wood

JONATHAN Gibbs might be retired, but only in the sense that he’s given up the regular paycheck. The artist, who has been Head of Illustration at the Edinburgh College of Art for the past 30 years, is the subject of two celebratory exhibitions this month, one in the Sculpture Court of his former workplace, the other in the city’s Open Eye Gallery, which has represented Gibbs for much of his career. The former concentrates on his published illustration over his university career, the latter on his paintings, drawings, collages and woodcuts. There are a lot of overlaps, this diverse artist tells me, “which I like!” His subject matter ranges dependant on whim and commission, from imaginings of a bridge over the Bosphorus designed by Michelangelo to the wildlife of Devon’s river Dart.

Born in 1953, he studied at the Lowestoft School of Art and the Slade, London. In 1978, Gibbs received the Cheltenham Painting Fellowship and began a career lecturing at various art colleges until his appointment to Edinburgh College of Art in 1990. Last summer, he retired – or “semi-retired” as he clarifies. Old habits die hard. But what he returns to again and again in our conversation is the freedom of producing work for its own sake in his studio, in Humbie, south of Edinburgh and just shy of the Borders, with the river close by.

If he is associated academically with the university, he has, like all lecturing artists, been working prolifically as an artist outside the college walls. His early working life was that of a freelancer, touting his portfolio of woodcuts around various publishers and periodicals. He became increasingly successful, his illustrative output wide and varied, from landscape illustrations for Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks to decorative endpapers for a number of books – something he loves doing – and textile patterns for St Jude’s.

He has illustrated exhibition publications, a book of Robert Frost poems for the Folio Society, six natural history works by the author Mark Cocker and an unpublished piece from Roger Deakin’s notebooks, written at

Walnut Tree Farm. He has created images for poems as elusive as TS Elliot’s “The Wasteland” – an abstract undertaking – to those as specific as Alice Oswald’s book “Dart”, about the eponymous river. He works in woodcut, creating distinctive images which are marked by fluidity, highly patterned, often compartmentalised, a narrative in lines. Even his paintings are made on wood.

Gibbs works is small scale, he tells me, and partly out of necessity for his studio is small too and everything is done on a table-top. There have been large works, occasionally, including a woodcut made on an old diving board. Recently, he took a sabbatical to research and created a large woodcut based on the song “Row, row, row your boat”, part of his fascination with rivers.

The process of working on something large scale involved a move out of the studio, into a more domestic frame – the dining room and his family of four, rollering ink onto “a huge piece of wood up on the dining room table.” They laid out a 15ft roll of paper his son’s girlfriend had sent from China and rubbed it with spoons to imprint the ink. “It was a major event!” he smiles.

His illustrative work is always changing. Book jobs take a long time, he says, with draft artworks sent in for approval, resubmitted, altered as necessary. Magazine work is often required in less than a week. “I like working with writers and designers. If someone gives me a poem or an article

about something or a non-fiction book which I must illustrate or create a cover image for, I find it a very interesting challenge. I’m interested in all of it, books and print and typography and paper – the whole culture of books.” Gibbs spends time in the National Library and the Poetry Library, looking at collections of old manuscripts and maps. “It’s almost the materials as much as the intellectual challenge. Illustration is a very interesting branch of the visual arts,” he says, and the root is fundamentally in drawing, for Gibbs, the importance of the line influencing both his woodcuts and his paintings.

There is another aspect to the Open Eye exhibition, for under his supervision 30 years worth of illustration students have left ECAs doors, including the wonderful children’s book illustrators, Emily Sutton and Catherine Rayner. Others have gone on to make graphic novels or create cartoons for the Guardian and the New Yorker, amongst many other publications. “I didn’t know anything about that side of things – they’ve taught me a lot!” Gibbs says. The Open Eye Gallery has picked a number of his former students to exhibit work in an “Alumni” exhibition which runs alongside his own, an interesting counterpart, too, to his illustrative work on display at ECA - and another sign of 30 years well spent.

Jonathan Gibbs: Paintings, Drawings and Wood Engravings, Open Eye Gallery, 24 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh, 0131 557 1020, www.openeyegallery.co.uk Until

Feb 3, Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm; Sat 10am-4pm Illustration by Jonathan Gibbs, ECA Sculpture Court, Edinburgh College of Art, Lauriston Place, Edinburgh www. eca.ed.ac.uk. Until Jan 26, Mon-Fri, 10am-5pm; Sat 10am-4pm

Gibbs’s artwork emphasises fluidity, marking a welcome juxtaposition, perhaps, with his material of choice: wood. Forming lines, he creates patterns and compartments. The result is often water and wood joined in one sphere