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Welcome
to the authorized website of
American fine artist Philip
Gladstone. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
the artist now lives and works in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.
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A prolific and uniquely gifted painter, draughtsman and sculptor with
stories to tell, passions to share and sometimes a protest to
make,
Philip Gladstone's layered, complex body of work best reveals its
secrets when the pictures are seen grouped together according to the
several major themes
that the artist has pursued and evolved over his brief, still-new
career. You'll find a generous selection of his best work presented
that way here.
As
one pioneer among a generation of artists recognizing and
embracing the new opportunities for artistic growth and
self-empowerment brought about by the rapid evolution of the World Wide
Web,
since 2004 Philip Gladstone has independently created, exhibited and
sold more than six thousand
paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints directly to his collectors,
exclusively online. |
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The
artist's studio |
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National
Critics Institute Fellow
Porter
Anderson is
a journalist whose venues
have included Time Warner's CNN networks,
the Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and many others. His roles
in newspapers,
magazines, network
television, and online network news have
included critic, reporter, news anchor, and senior producer. Mr.
Anderson
was among Philip Gladstone's earliest collectors, and in the summer of
2007 he wrote this thoughtful appreciation of the artist's
achievement to that date.
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If
Philip
Gladstone's many paintings and drawings were all brought
together in a
massive mural –
Diego Rivera style –
it would be
clear, even to a newcomer to his work, that this is an artist's world
of self-research, meditation, discovery and comment.
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As in
Rivera's 1934 Man at the Crossroads (Fresco Museo del Palacio de
Belles Artes in Mexico City), Gladstone is convening a career-wide
throng of iconic figures, most of them absorbed in their own moments
and plights. Rivera's workers of a world then bound by dreams of
Marxist solidarity here are supplanted by elements of one personality,
facets of Gladstone's inner vision of himself, of significant souls, of
issues, pressures, quandaries.
Gladstone's people are characters rarely seen together, glimpsed in the
crowded isolation of their respective loneliness. They are sometimes no
farther away from each other than next door, or at the next seat at an
outdoor table, or at arm's length in a grotto's pool of water. But in
contact? Not frequently and never in the rows of patient, enthralled
citizens who populate the audiences and rallies of Rivera's global town
hall.
Nevertheless, just as clearly as Rivera pictured his farmers,
scientists, political leaders and industrialists, Gladstone creates his
own factory workers, letter readers, sons, fathers, staircase climbers,
hotel guests and wakeful, watching young men in bathtubs, bedrooms,
swimming holes, beside windows, tables, parrots, dogs, in beds and
boats, on beaches and turrets, in chilly afternoon light and the glow
of storybook-drippy candles.
Stylistically, Gladstone has created an idiomatic vocabulary as
distinctive as the bent backs of Rivera's peasants.
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The Cupola
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| Unanticipated |
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| The Homecoming |
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Almost
always vested in the image of a nude young man, Gladstone's subject in
any given piece may take the form of a teenager whose head is always
turned sharply rightward, eyes downcast, chastened; or of a youth
sitting alone at the top of a banistered landing; or of a figure curled
behind a door, lying on its side, possibly unconscious. Interiors are
often Hopper-empty. Wide floor planks and molded doorways stand behind
clapboard exteriors, New England's relentless melancholy a constant
ether pervading these personalities' spaces.
There are boys here who want to communicate and are dramatically
thwarted, from the naked twenty-something who tries to place a call in
a roadside phone booth to the one pressing his ear to a wall by his bed
and the other one distraught beside a vase of flowers, a page of paper
and an instrument that might be a knife and might be a letter opener.
Others have every opportunity to communicate and don't. The
"navigators," as Gladstone names them, are young men whose toy ships
don't bring them together as friends in the lagoon in which they stand.
The naked young man behind many doors in many paintings remains
invisible to the dozing fatherly figure in the armchair. The boy seated
in a dinghy across from a glowering Buddha-like black man is terrified,
not led to reaching out.
Seen as sexual by many viewers, the Gladstone canon is certainly
accessible as an ongoing discussion in sensual self-discovery, identity
debate and longing. But little here is pornographic, in that the
characters' intents, like the artist's, are almost never titillation.
Intellectual arousal seems harder for these male seekers to come by
than the physical and they're likelier to be paralyzed than liberated
by their solitude.
Political moments sometimes enter a canvas through images of bright
televisions in dark rooms carrying presidential speeches, watched by
lone, naked men.
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The work
of other artists – Picasso, Eakins, Caravaggio –
occasionally surfaces, sometimes in direct, amusing confrontations
between Gladstone's iconic figures and some of the artists'. And
Gladstone at times appropriates a page of text and/or image from an
author – Thurber is a favorite – on which a new
line drawing, maybe some color, is sketched.
The son of a one-time Disney artist, caricature seems to be in
Gladstone's genes. While in recent months a new interest in detailed
and convincing figure work from excellent life models has become a
welcome upgraded interest in his work, Gladstone's top-level view
remains a mythic Americana, neither so domestically detailed as
Rockwell's nor so painfully austere as Wyeth's, but usually tinged with
pageantry. As carefully rendered as a thigh or shoulder might be, the
bathtub is truncated like a tugboat's hull. As faithfully shadowed as a
hand may be on one wall, the room's other wall may be angled into a
line of perspective that isn't quite of our dimension, providing the
unsettling potential of a world so long past Palladio's reach that we
have new depths to discover, new points to watch vanish.
The speed at which Gladstone works is blistering. Both blessing and
curse, the fact that eBay is his prime outlet for sales requires
constantly replenished inventory and his most devoted collectors will
buy originals only. A recent uptick in the number of drawings offered
(sometimes with paint, sometimes with pastels) has coincided with the
new attention to figurative modeling. A busy print-making sideline has
developed so Gladstone can provide inexpensive but quality copies of
many of the hundreds of paintings and drawings he has sold.
The blessing of this high demand and need to work fast is the
incremental evolution and appearance of the Gladstone gathering of
iconic figures. The letter writer, for example, has appeared in myriad
formulations of what appear to be happy and sad letters, crouched and
standing studies of them, thoughtful and despairing reactions to their
contents.
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The curse,
of course, is the challenge of keeping quality and specificity in place
under such pressure to produce.
Gladstone handles it remarkably well, especially for a man with a
family. His background in frame-making obviously helps on the shipping
end of the job an eBay success entails. Collectors making a
late-evening perusal will find on most evenings that Gladstone somehow
has new works posting.
And the clever, gentle development of the images marches on. There's a
striking entry, the kind of sudden arrival on the scene of a "new kid"
that occurs in this fast-widening oeuvre: This one is a youth in a
nighttime stand of birch trees, somehow walking right into one, unable,
it seems to tell left from right.
There will always be viewers of this work who, like that kid, can't see
the forest for at least one tree. Gladstone's male nudity is unabashed
and laid out in increasingly fine brush strokes, a technical evolution
that succeeds a former style of thickly applied waves of paint. It's as
startling for some to encounter this work for the first time as it is
inevitable to the Gladstone language that these men will be naked. They
are that way for a reason, maybe more than one reason. And while this
factor can limit the appeal for some, it will free it for others.
You have only to imagine the contemporary males Gladstone conjures
suddenly wearing jeans, scooting around on skateboards, MP3-ed for the
street as we see them in reality, and you understand how impossible it
would be to do this work with clothed figures. They are naked because
they are lonely, confused, solitary – and they engage,
indulge and shudder in being solitary, confused and lonely because they
are naked.
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Apparel is
an armor as useful to the psyche as it is to the body. Taking it off
always reveals something of both.
To Gladstone's credit, he gets the armor off, never sparing himself
what he requires of his iconic subjects – watch for the many
self-portraits that pepper his online store's offerings.
And if that mural ever is made, it will be a sight for smart eyes, a
great and towering community of handsome privacy in huddled proximity
to a world as baffled by the fearful moments as it is scared of power
shifts.
Rivera's work at 30 Rockefeller Plaza was stopped and removed when it
was decided that Vladimir Lenin was too kindly featured among workers
of the world. Today, he's honored worldwide for his vision in symbolic
grace, energy and political prescience.
Gladstone, whose work may disturb, scandalize or anger some viewers,
has good "navigators," and a small army of associate, haunting
archetypes who can get under the skin quickly, especially male skin.
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| Figures in an Interior (diptych, self-portraits) |
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Guys
look at these images and may not feel like making any admissions
in mixed company, but they find themselves here, their own unseen
falterings and naked doubts, about themselves, about others, about the
rooms in which they discover themselves.
As another Man at the Crossroads of social norm and personal
expression, Gladstone is doing just fine.
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| Philip Gladstone Fine Arts
| PO Box 126,
Dover-Foxcroft Maine 04426 USA | gladstone.studio@gmail.com |
| Website design
by Philip Gladstone | All contents Copyright © Philip
Gladstone, All Rights Reserved |
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