Carter by Charles Gibbs
Charles Gibbs

Charles Gibbs was born in California in 1947 and grew up in a semi-rural area near Berkeley.  He learned about mid-century modern art with visits to Bay Area museums and galleries, art books in the home, and Saturday classes at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.  Inspired by the Beat-era artists he admired, he started making sculpture when he was fifteen, assembling pieces of junk metal in his father's workshop.  He was also a national champion in A.A.U. swimming.

After high school, Charles attended U.C. Berkeley, at a time of intense social and political upheaval.  He dropped out after a few semesters, worked as a merchant seaman in Alaska for a while, and was drafted into the Army at the height of the Vietnam War.  Fortune smiled, and instead of slogging through rice paddies, he was assigned to a top-secret weapons testing program in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert.  He worked amidst exploding bombs and artillery shells, but suffered nothing worse than sunburn.

After his release from the Army, Charles returned to the Bay Area and took up sculpture again, but his restless nature led him to join a video production unit that traveled across the U.S. and Europe, documenting the Transcendental Meditation movement and its controversial leader, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He worked in the Swiss Alps for eight months, and for extended periods in Majorca and Italy.

In 1977 Charles returned to Berkeley to complete his undergraduate studies, working as an auto mechanic to supplement his G.I. Bill benefits, and then earned an M.S. degree at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.  He took a job with a Boston publishing company, got married, bought a home, separated, sold the home, got divorced, and by 1987 was sharing an old house west of Boston with a couple of friends.

A prior occupant of the house had apparently been an inventor; the cellar floor was littered with small machine parts.  After a hiatus of seventeen years, Charles started making sculpture again, using the trove of junk in the cellar.  Within a couple of years, he met and married a painter, Charlotte Andry Gibbs, and they settled in an old farmhouse in Pepperell, Massachusetts.  They both have studios in the barn.

Charlotte encouraged Charles to show his work, and in 1999 he made the leap from business executive to full-time artist.  His work has been shown at the Fuller Craft Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Ohio Craft Museum, Montserrat College of Art, and Copia in Napa Valley; at U.S. embassies in Belgium, Belarus, and Cuba; and at commercial galleries in San Francisco, New Orleans, Florida, and throughout New England.  He’s won awards at the Fitchburg Art Museum and Concord Art, and his work is in private collections throughout North America and in Europe.

 

"I do two types of work -- stylized representations of animals, birds, and fish, and more abstract pieces that often feature wheels, boat hulls, and house forms.  I'm inspired by the natural world and by my imagination.

"Except for a few childhood art classes and a high-school crafts class, I haven't studied art.  I usually work with found metal, but also use new metal stock, and the work occasionally includes wood, bone, and other found materials, as well as paint and gold leaf.  I often work spontaneously, without drawings or plans, letting the pieces evolve during the process of assembling them."

Carter
Charles Gibbs
Mixed Media
21" x 11" x 8"
2020
$1,200
Prices and availability may change without prior notice.
A price quote alone does not constitute a hold on the item.
All items remain property of Field Gallery until paid in full.