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Recent Exhibitions
Introduction | Iconic Shapes | The Inks | Drawings Revisited | Collaborations
Max Gimblett: The language of drawing (17 May – 28 July 2002)
The Inks
 Max Gimblett working in his studio New York, 1983. Photograph by David Stark. Reproduced with permission. |
The inks – ‘one shot' drawing
The influence of Asia has a long lineage in Max Gimblett's work. Even before establishing himself as a painter, he had turned for guidance as a young potter to Shoji Hamada and Bernhard Leach. When he commenced his sumi ink drawings, he studied Gibbon Sengai, the master Zen painter and poet from Japan.
The calligraphic gesture, which paradoxically requires extreme concentration and abandonment to the unconscious, takes a single stroke with a loaded brush to establish a motif. There may be splattering and flooding of the diluted ink onto the paper, with a whole series of dance-like movements established across numerous sheets. More often, the artiststrikes the paper with an ink-laden Chinese brush, slapping the floor with his foot and shouting as if to trigger and release the image.
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