Finding a Language in Paint
Gibbs told me he was born and raised in Baltimore, started painting in 2015 when his wife gave him an easel for Father’s Day, and that his first effort was trash. He laughed when he said it, but the way he carried the story made it clear: he found his language in paint. Since then, that language has been translating lived experience, his, his family’s, and by extension, ours.
Standing with him, I asked how someone new to art should take in his work. “Approach it with the mindset that it is not complicated,” he said. “It is literally about life.” He pointed to one painting about the death of his father, another about the joys of summer. Universal experiences are the entry point, he told me. The specificity, the Baltimore childhood, the southern summers in Virginia, the father of two daughters now looking through their eyes, is his.
60 x 50 ″
Oil on canvas
The Firefly Painting
Later, when I dug into his notes on the firefly painting, I saw how deliberate that resonance was. Gibbs titled it Carnations, Lilies, Lilies, Roses, and Lightning Bugs. The canvas is inspired by John Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, but Gibbs shifts the light source from paper lanterns in an English garden to fireflies hovering in the southern dark. He describes summers spent in Blackstone, Virginia, where lightning bugs patterned the night with their flicker. Light, in his work, is both memory and metaphor, a way to capture fleeting beauty, abundance, and the fragile geography of identity.
Past, Present, and Fatherhood
That sense of doubling, personal and universal, past and present, is what makes his canvases stick. As a kid, summer meant running in and out of air conditioning, sweat drying before another rush into the heat. As a father, summer is airports, other countries, watching his daughters’ voices carry memories back home. “My art is a reflection of my life,” he told me. “The more you dive within, the more rich your work will be.”
And yet the paintings do not announce themselves as memoir. They ask you to bring your own summers, your own losses, your own joy. Which is why I could not stop thinking about my nieces while standing there. Gibbs’ brushwork builds a room, but you decide who sits inside.
Galerie Myrtis and the Booth
This conversation was made possible by Galerie Myrtis, whose booth was showing not just Gibbs but also Ronald Jackson, Bria Sterling Wilson, and Felandus Thames. It felt like a small ecosystem of artists committed to joy and complexity, each in a distinct register.
Upcoming Solo Show
If you missed Gibbs at the Armory, you will have another chance soon. His solo show, No Solace in the Shade, opens at the Brandywine Museum of Art on September 28, 2025, and runs through March 1, 2026. Address: 1 Hoffman’s Mill Road, Chadds Ford, PA 19317. His artist statement says it plainly: he wants to capture joy, beauty, and the mundane, the whole spread of lived experience, as a way of coping with the past and reflecting the present.
For me, it started with a painting of two little girls who looked like family, and fireflies I almost did not see. For Gibbs, it is about life, experience, and documenting both before they slip away.
— Amon Focus
