Stephen Gibb - Artist Statement (Or, at least a feeble attempt to excuse my behaviour to those present with good taste) My artwork weaves an eclectic tapestry of cultural and social influences. At one moment it may make a single-punch-line comment on pop culture while the next it may construct a complex and playful diorama probing into the outer perimeters of human nature. My work is often categorized as pop surrealism but I’d begrudgingly prefer to tag it as existential editorial cartoon realism, just because it sounds more intelligent and funny at the same time. The work holds a certain reverence and faithfulness to reality mimicry but leans away enough to fall in the shadow of the “uncanny valley”, the area where the mind is unsettled by what looks real enough but couldn’t possible be. It is in this realm, theoretically, that the mind’s gamma waves are super-stimulated and brain activity resembles fireworks. I resolve that this accounts for the broad reactions my work garners from observers, that ranges from contemptuous dismissal to enthusiastic exuberance. We are all wired differently. The medium is the method, which has been a faithful deployment of oil painting and traditional oilpainting techniques, such as glazing and the occasional dalliance into chiaroscuro. The richness achieved by layers of thinned oil paint on MDF panels always adds an interesting luminous quality to the final piece. My direction as of late has been to devote more to composing on the panels rather than in pre-sketches. I’m intrigued by the more spontaneous and gratifying results of ideas presenting themselves in the process rather than in the planning, hence the falloff in the recent output of sketches. Often a core image or concept dictates subliminally as to how the composition manifests itself.