It has been two years since Josh Gibson’s second sold-out exhibition at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, Arizona. A 2016 graduate of the California College of the Arts with a BFA degree with distinction in illustration, he appeared in two group shows the following year at Medicine Man. In 2019, when we were preparing an article on emerging artists for this magazine, Sublette suggested Gibson and his work without hesitation.
At that time, Gibson commented on his work, “With a perception forged by the surreal qualities of the Sonoran Desert, I find myself preoccupied by the magical dance of reality and continually impressed by nature and the human brain. Many of my projects are conceived in a process that is almost alchemical, consisting of a merging of previously unrelated ideas and themes. I feel as though knowledge is an ever-expanding toolbelt with pockets that are infinitely deep. The contents of these pockets can be used to relay both contemporary and eternal themes.”
Shadow of a New Dawn, 2025, oil on linen, 36 x 42 in. “The light and drama in this piece has a very specific feeling to me. Almost like it has been lit theatrically, a heightened version of reality.”Magic and reality continue to be basic themes in his drawings and paintings, as will be seen in his latest exhibition at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Josh Gibson: Fractured Light, opening November 15.
In his artist statement, he writes succinctly, “I strive to create images that are as eternal as the mountains themselves and as ephemeral as the light cast through the clouds. Taking the forms before me, I transmute them into graphic representations that are bolder, more immediately readable, and charged with contrast. I aim to not only represent the immediate visual qualities of the land but also the subtle qualities of the atmosphere and mood that a photograph or straight-forward rendering cannot.”
He distills the forms of the desert and eliminates distracting detail, inspired by the greats of the past like Maynard Dixon and, more recently, Ed Mell, but with his own sense of design and color palette.
Distant Stone and Mystery, 2025, oil on linen, 18 x 24 in. “I’ve wanted to paint this formation outside of Monument Valley for over a decade and finally found a way to represent it in succinct, graphic form. A single tree, a low flying band of purple clouds and shadows cast by bright sun.”
He has also admired the hard-edged forms, dynamic shapes and colors of Ed Ruscha’s gas station and 20th Century Fox paintings that “can hold space. I was focusing on the edges of shapes and found that the finer the edge the more of an illusion there is of true form,” Gibson says.
Looking at Salvador Dalí’s surreal landscapes when he was a kid, he was attracted to their desert backgrounds. “Something about his desert backgrounds kept kicking around in my head. They’re deserts but not deserts. They’re the real thing but also something else more powerful. It’s ‘Nature+.’ The artist heightens the subject creating something new to show people a subject through a new lens,” he says, adding that numerous contemporary Western artists have helped him discover what kind of artist he is. “Ed Mell was very kind to me. I learned a lot by osmosis. He taught me without trying to teach me. I’ve also learned a lot from Tony Abeyta and Howard Post. What I like is their element of the traditional rooted in historical painting and then their massive twist that breaks off into their own thing.”
Jagged Sky, 2025, oil on linen, 12 x16 in. “This painting is a larger version of a small painting I made a few years ago that I’ve kept on the wall in my studio. The forms exist somewhere between two and three dimensions—they are both real and illusion.”
He continues, “I edit down the landscapes and want them to have an immediate impact. Then, if a person wants to, they can delve more into them. I come from a background of illustration, how a composition is put together and how a viewer’s eye moves around a composition and can be directed. The main way the eye reads things is through the contrast of light and dark that initially imprints on the retina with no thinking at all. I want people to have that kind of basic, immediate connection.”
Dark Horse, 2025, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in. “I saw this horse out in the middle of a barren desert. Wandering, far from everything, completely content. Dark and wise.”
For Mark Sublette’s Masters of Drawing exhibition earlier this year, Gibson dusted off the fine drawing skills he used to produce the posters for his thesis in college. Eternity “harkens back to that period but I brought to it what I have discovered since then. It’s more eternal. It’s also thousands of dots and dashes that make up the fabric of the illusion that is this drawing. A tedious process but one that I very much enjoy,” he says. “A lot of my work is chasing the big themes nature represents to me—it’s the notion of an unending, infinite thing.”
Blue Mesa, 2025, oil on linen 8 x 10 in. “I remember this day clearly. I visited the same spot a few times. There was a watering hole surrounded by horses and then by cattle, new ones drifting in and departing, it was the center of their natural world.”
One of his earlier paintings, The Faint Substance of Dawn reminded me of the classic Western photographer Edward S. Curtis’s photo Canyon de Chelly, 1904. Known for his detailed portraits of Native Americans and their lives, Curtis edited his image down to the essentials: massive, barely detailed walls of stone, dwarfed dogs and riders on horseback, and a large negative space of sky. Gibson describes his painting as “a very graphic piece with color that is purely imagined, somehow the space feels true. I find that the sense of scale and grandeur can be communicated better in solid masses of color.”
Cold Lightning, 2025, oil on linen, 45 x 36 in. Private collection. “I wanted to make an image that was indicative of the spirit of the Far West show. The cowboy and horse are suspended between earth and sky, framed by dust and lightning.”
Eternity, 2024, ink on Bristol paper, 10 x 15 in. Private collection. Courtesy Medicine Man Gallery. “Thousands of dots and dashes make up the fabric of the illusion that is this drawing. A tedious process but one that I very much enjoy.”
In another earlier work, The Long Echo, the composition is simple, yet complex. “The triple horizontal bands echo each other in different colors like different musical notes,” he says. “It’s a compositional element true to how nature is. There are a lot of things in my head. I think I’m making up a design that can’t exist in nature and then I go outside and see it there. Sometimes I’ll see something or get a reference, a flash of graphic design in my head that I want to translate to canvas. Sometimes it goes smoothly and at other times it’s tricky. I want to get my paintings to a place where there is solidity to the idea that I’m bringing into reality. I feel like I have had a lot of ideas almost instantaneously as I’m about to go to sleep or when I’m meditating. I feel meditating is similar to exercise. Exercise is good for your body and meditating is good for your mind. They make it easier to paint with less mental and physical stress.”
The Faint Substance of Dawn, 2024, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. Private collection. Courtesy Medicine Man Gallery. “A very graphic piece with color that is purely imagined, somehow the space feels true. I find that the sense of scale and grandeur can be communicated better in solid masses of color.”
One of his new paintings is Distant Stone and Mystery. He remarks, “I’ve wanted to paint this formation outside of Monument Valley for over a decade and finally found a way to represent it in succinct graphic form. A single tree, a low flying band of purple clouds and shadows cast by bright sun…There is something profound about being out in nature watching something like a monsoon coming in over Tucson or a storm in the Valley of the Gods. With the immense force and massive power, there is a calmness. When I’m out in nature, in a place without people, the silence is pervasive.” —
The Long Echo, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in. Private Collection. “This painting features huge rolling clouds and is reminiscent of many storms I’ve seen in Arizona, silent and immense, powerful and full of rain.”
Josh Gibson: Fractured Light
Opens November 15, 2025Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery
6872 E. Sunrise Drive, Suite #130, Tucson, AZ 85750
(520) 722-7798, www.medicinemangallery.com
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