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.
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.
About
the Artist
