MARK GIBSON
Shifting focus
UPCOMING SHOW
Up to 15 works
March 15-22, 2019
Mountain Trails Galleries
301 Main Street
Park City, UT 84060
(435) 615-8748
mountaintrailsgalleries.comSHOW LOCATION PARK CITY, UT
Mountain Lake Lodge, oil, 36 x 36" Under the Western Sky, oil, 48 x 42"
M
ark Gibson has long been fascinated
by the teepee—its unique shape,
its practical design, the ability to
pick it up and move it wherever a Native
American tribe might be headed next. The
teepee once again takes center stage in
Gibson’s new work, but so does a second
element, the landscape.
“It’s still too early to tell what exactly the
entire show is going to look like, but it will
more than likely have a good mixture of teepee
paintings, and maybe a buffalo or two,” Gibson
says from his studio near Missoula, Montana.
“Once upon a time the teepees took up more
space on the canvas, but lately I’ve been havingfun with the landscape. It’s been nice showing
more of the scenery and really focusing on
those aspects.”
That shift in focus to the land allows Gibson
to paint works such as Nature’s Spotlight, a
48-inch-wide landscape of a forest that meets a
shoreline while the day’s last light rakes across
the top of the trees as the sun relinquishes the
day to night.
“That one came to me after painting a work
for a friend who had a cabin on a mountain
lake here in Montana. That was the very last
light that was passing over the tamarack trees,
which turn yellow in fall,” he says of the work.
“The moment I saw this it looked like the treeswere on fire as the last light of the day touched
that fall color. It was magnificent.”
Gibson will be showing this work and more
than a dozen others beginning March 15 at a
new show Mountain Trails Gallery in Park City,
Utah. In addition to the landscape paintings,
major new teepee works include People’s
Lodge and Green Blanket Door, both of which
show the Native American lodges in relation to
the larger landscape scenes in which they are
placed. They are rooted in grass, and clouds
fill the limitless air above them. They have an
abstract quality to them, but Gibson sees less
abstraction than geometry.
“They’re very geometric, which is maybe