Nick Ryan Gallery presents Object / Image, an exhibition featuring painters John Gibson and Andrew Watel. While both artists take a similar approach to subject matter, their investigations unfold in distinct ways.
John Gibson has been painting spheres for nearly 40 years. However, the “balls” in his work are not derived from baseballs, billiard balls, or traditional still life arrangements. Instead, they serve as a conceptual framework—an ongoing exploration of form, light, and space. His use of light and dark to create volume, cast shadows to define space, and decorative elements to introduce color recalls the techniques of Baroque still life painters from Spain and the Netherlands.
“Essentially, what I’m doing is making a minimalist work with the tools of much older European painting. I want them both.” - John Gibson
Andrew Watel also does not work from life but instead relies on measurement and memory. He selects anonymous, utilitarian objects—a fan, a spring, a tire—for their formal qualities of shape, color, and geometry. Beginning with precise measurements, he establishes a framework, adjusts the composition, and invents the light. His process is one of searching, where forms emerge and disappear through drawing and erasure. The history of the surface reveals both certainty and doubt, transforming the subject into the work itself.
John Gibson is a painter living in Greenfield, MA. He earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1980 and completed his postgraduate studies at Yale. He had his first solo show at the University of Massachusetts in 1984 and began participating in group exhibitions in Boston and New York in the late 1980s. Gibson’s work has been recognized in prominent publications such as the Boston Globe, the Partisan Review, and The New Yorker. His paintings are held in numerous corporate and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, University of Massachusetts, Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC, and the New York Public Library.
Andrew Watel grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He received an undergraduate degree in Painting from The University of California at San Francisco in 1977 and a Master of Fine Art from Yale University in 1983. Upon graduating from Yale, he moved to New York City where he independently pursued painting and teaching. In 1993, as a founding member, he established and developed The Painting Center, an independent non-profit artist run space. He curated several shows there, including the work of such ‘painter’s painters’ as Albert York and Jake Berthot. Thirty-one years later, The Center remains viable today and offers artists alternative exhibition space. From 2006 until 2017 he taught as an Adjunct Professor of Painting and Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. Here he developed his own curricula for beginning and advanced painting and drawing, led seminars and supervised independent projects.
In 2018 Watel moved to Kansas City to pursue painting full-time.
