BRATTLEBORO — The Catherine Dianich Gallery is currently aglow with the paintings of Gilbert “Gib” Taylor, a longtime and much-loved teacher at Marlboro College who died in 2006.
Taylor, born in 1929 and raised on Deer Isle, Maine, attended Harvard University and the Art Students League and, after serving in Germany during the Korean War, went to the American School of Art in New York on the GI Bill.
He lived in New York for 10 years, his “painting adolescence” as he called it, and absorbed the predominant art movement of the time: abstract expressionism.
He and his family spent a few years in California before he was approached to teach woodworking at the fledgling Marlboro College.
“He was so modest, it wasn't until a long while after he was hired that we realized who we had,” said Tom Ragle, president of Marlboro at the time.
“He was a gem!” Ragle said - “brilliant at so many things.”
Deer Isle was a fishing town. Growing up there, Taylor saw and took part in boat building, and characterized woodworking as “just the utilization of a skill I have.” He used that skill with subversive humor.
I spoke with a contemporary of Taylor's, David Rohn (whose paintings are on exhibit this month also, at Mitchell-Giddings Fine Art, a few doors down Main Street).
Until our conversation, Rohn, who taught at Windham College at the same time as Taylor did at Marlboro, did not realize he and Taylor shared an early ambition to be cartoonists.
“I'm not surprised,” Rohn said. “His work had a lot of wit. He had a quiet interior sense of humor.”
Rohn described one of his favorite Taylor pieces: Picasso's found-object bull's head sculpture, bike handlebars as horns, reproduced as a finely crafted wood sculpture - a kind of sculptural “double entendre.”
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Painting, though, was a serious matter for Taylor, and the large oil paintings at the Dianich Gallery are more connected to his interest in color perception (he studied and taught it) and the history of painting than an attempt at wit, though they have a certain levity.
In an essay written to accompany a show of Taylor's at the gallery he ran, William Price called Taylor's painting “different” from the drawings and the sculpture and “more difficult.”
Price wrote that for Taylor, the process of painting “is complicated in some ways by the fact that he does everything else so easily. I think in Gib's mind it is the higher artistic endeavor.”
The 26 paintings, watercolors, and woodblock prints in the Dianich show illustrate how Taylor approaches each medium on its own terms. There is little carryover between watercolors and oils. The paintings have little in common with the sculptures.
“When I paint I'm more involved with essences,” Taylor once wrote in a piece published in the Brattleboro Reformer. “I know what I'm painting but I'm not as involved with what it is.”
“Paint is the subject of my painting. The integrity of the canvas lies more in how the parts interrelate than how strongly related it is to the subject.”
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One of the qualities that excited curator Dan Sherry about Taylor's work was being able to see “painting history –– it's all there … what was happening.”
Henri Matisse, who painted between 1890 and 1954, was still a huge influence for many modern painters when Taylor cut his painter's teeth. Pierre Bonnard figures prominently; Richard Diebenkorn, Milton Avery, and Marsden Hartley were also acknowledged influences.
One interviewer commented about Taylor, “He speaks of his mentors as if they were his daily companions.”
Remarkably, Taylor was able to achieve a very personal vision in his painting while clearly owing much to these masters. They're not intimidating, they're not emulated. Rather, these artists are the wind beneath his wings - or brushes.
Only three landscapes appear in this show, watercolors that appear to have been done plein air. The watercolor paint is given free rein to do its thing, especially in “Arching Tree.” The tree and foreground are barely more than two puddles of color, yet they convey all they need to about that tree and how it's situated on the land.
“The Lobster Wharf,” a subject that Taylor must have seen many times on trips back home, is direct and loose in handling of the paint while still rendering the particulars of the scene convincingly.
I'm not sure all of the oil paintings on view are equally successful; one gray-mauve interior I find too dark and too vague. But most of the others hit the mark, and they are marvels of color, space, light, and form.
These paintings speak eloquently of Taylor's love of the medium (described by him as “a thick soup of pigment, turpentine, and wax”) and of his relishing the application of paint, which is often freewheeling and exuberant, yet often just enough restrained to achieve elegance.
His palette owes much to Bonnard - vivid mauve, magenta, oranges. But then Taylor comes in with subtle counterpoints of finessed, subdued colors that seem to glow from within their molecules.
An ardent colorist, Taylor once described his approach to color: “How one color affects or qualifies another is my main preoccupation […] rather than blending two colors to make a third, I like to intersperse one over another so that the nature of the first is changed by the nature of the second...I like to apply paint in such a way that negative space defines positive space. The outlines of an object are defined by its background.”
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As Rohn has done in the paintings down the street, Taylor paints what is close at hand - what he knows and loves. A certain plant, pot, chair, table, music stand might show up repeatedly. Also, a view to the wooded hills outside his window is a favored motif.
One of the most striking qualities in Taylor's paintings is his evocation of space.
Taylor has said, “One of the things sculpture offers is that it becomes an interacting element. Painting exists in its own space. It's illusory.”
Looking at the large interior oils in the show, it appears to me Taylor set for himself this challenge: how to engage the viewer with that illusory space.
In many of these paintings, he succeeds splendidly. He pulls the viewer in by devoting large swaths of canvas to showing the floor beneath the table or chair, extending it to the edge of the picture plane.
Sherry, looking at “Orange Seat, Gray Jug, Studio,” exclaimed, “You can walk right in!”
I think Taylor would have been very pleased!
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One might have thought that Taylor, as a sculptor, would render the forms in his paintings three-dimensionally, with highlights, shading, and other techniques to evoke depth. But the forms in these paintings at Dianich Gallery are determinedly flat. Perhaps his sculpted pieces allowed him that freedom, compelling him in his paintings to embrace the essential challenge: to evoke form and space while adhering to the reality of the two-dimensional plane.
When I asked gallery owner Catherine Dianich about her choice to show Taylor's paintings, her response was, “Gib Taylor's work is as current today as if it was made in the studio last week.”
I would heartily agree.