Articles

Skins of Light: An Appreciation
Matt Dibble on display at Tregoning & Company
By Douglas Max Utter

Like half-remembered myths Matt Dibble’s figures move as outlines across a patchwork ground of light and shade, color and pattern. In his painting Light Wounds of Early Youth, the half- inch dark brown line that defines the figure moves fluidly over a mottled background of pale pastel colors. This flat, uninflected stroke might be used to render a geometric shape in another sort of painting, and here it retains something of that formal, expository quality: it seems as if the figure depicted is a theorem, as much or more than a person. Perhaps each of these characters in recent paintings like Facing Down Giants, Missing Rungs, and Break Ornaments, Spill Food, is a constellation of a sort, a depiction of the imaginary lines that tenuously connect distant explosions of experience, seen or sensed in a painting long after the fact.

For most of the past three decades Dibble has been known mainly as a painter of expressive abstract works that emphasize the physical qualities of the painted surface. These often very active, crowded compositions seem to enact collisions between figure and ground, As with the ambitious, emotive physicality of paintings by Willem De Kooning or Jackson Pollock from the early 1950’s, Dibble’s works of this type are agons, battles between the artist’s dynamic gesture and the limits of the various surfaces (panel, canvas, etc.) he chooses; on the sidelines we also can sense the usual spectators: the idea of literal depiction, and traces of the self. His Quarry (2005), for instance, which deliberately echoes the dimensions and energies of DeKooning’s seminal Excavation (1950), is an account of violence, but also of concealment. DeKooning’s shattered fragments seem to represent the half-buried carnage of the Second World War, while the paper bag-brown rectilinear shapes that cobble over Dibble’s space might be seen to resemble the iconic hooded prisoner at Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

The source of Dibble’s figurative paintings is an ongoing series of small, lithe ink drawings. As fluid as calligraphy, they are at once the opposite of his tumultuous abstractions, and their complement. While his non-representational works explore as wide a range as possible of the visual incidents that chemistry and gesture can generate, Dibble’s drawings are in equal measure restrained. And yet the paintings which are exact enlargements of these quiet graphic interludes seem like a more sober articulation of the same visceral strain and drama. Limpid in their quietness and crisp, these drawn works are examples of transformation, cutting and pruning the human figure and the space in which it is embedded with sharp triangular sections, like thorns.

In Light Wounds of Early Youth the nude male figure is located, just barely, in interior space. He leans with a distorted limb against a yellow plane, which seems to be part of a room, or the thought of a room. If before leaning the limb was an arm, it has changed; it flattens out at the end and has an armored, spiked appearance. The artist has caught this personage in mid-metamorphosis, as if he were a Celtic selkie just returned from the sea. His stocky, amphibian legs stand on rectangular, toe-less feet, and the room itself is insubstantial with its oddly rounded floor and thinly applied paint, like an hallucination. An even  less structured ground flickers within the breast of the creature ; it is tempting to associate the title with this flickering: here are transcendent wounds of light,  as well as superficial bodily or emotional injuries -- the sort of marks that Jacob might have received as he wrestled with the angel.

Butler Institute presents its unique juried show.

Sunday, July 16, 2006
The Butler Institute of American Art presents its unique juried show.
By L. CROW, VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT

Dr. Louis Zona, executive director of the Butler Institute of American Art, proclaimed the 70th National Midyear Exhibition as one of the best in years.

"Every aesthetic philosophy is represented, from traditional to avante garde," he said. "There are no weak pieces."

When Joseph Butler III started this exhibition 70 years ago, it was held in January as a New Year show, but was moved to summer sometime in the '60s.

What makes this particular show so unique, however, is that it is one of the few juried art shows still held at a major museum. Artists from all over the United States may submit slides or CDs of their works.

This year, 44 paintings are on display, representing 36 states, ranging from established artists to those who are just emerging.

And the judges over the years have been some of the country's most prestigious artists. This year's judge was Peter Plagens, a well-known abstract painter and art critic/writer from Newsweek. Plagens also has exhibited his works at the Butler.

"The Midyear remains one of the most important juried art shows in the country," said Zona. "Many artists choose not to submit works to jury. It has to do with the philosophical question of 'can any kind of judgment be placed on a work of art?' But others see it differently — a feather in their cap. If you Google 'Midyear,' you would be amazed at how many now established artists had works in a midyear exhibition."

Participation

"Many museums just don't want to go through all the work it takes to present this show," added Kathy Earnhart, director of public relations at the Butler.

"Close to 2,000 artists submitted paintings this year. But the Butler has acquired many beautiful pieces through the Midyear. Each year, we purchase at least one."

This year's purchase is a painting by Cuyahoga Falls artist Mark Giangasper, titled, "Portrait of Chris," a pastel of the artist's brother who died of AIDS. It also won the Diane Bernhard Award. Another interesting aspect of the show is that it isn't based on any theme or unifying element.

"Such a variety of approaches are represented here," said Zona. "The show is a cross section of all mediums of painting from all over the country — New York City to small towns. It is a good look at what is going on in the current world of art."

And there is variety among painters.

Gary Erbe of Union City, N.J., has two works on display. "He is a self-taught artist who collects old things and paints them," said Zona. "He uses traditional materials and prepares the canvas in a traditional way. He also designs his own frames."

A painting titled "The Journey" resembles an embossed Christmas card from the early 20th century. Three angels are topped by a Santa scene. Another painting, "Double Image," depicts a teal-colored shelf that displays an old-fashioned camera on a folded silk cloth, a little wooden mannequin, a small globe and several collections of paints. Even though the two paintings are very different, they both project a wonderful look of texture, a 3-D effect, which makes one want to touch them.

Matthew Dibble of Lakewood, Ohio, also has two paintings in the exhibit. "Quarry" is a large oil in hues of earth tones and bears a hint of cubism. This fascinating work, which won an honorable mention, takes shape as the viewer steps farther back, with figures slowly appearing out of the chaos. Another work, "Perception of Trees" is much more abstract and features shades of pinks, blues, mauves. But, tree shapes are obvious.

Area artist

Three area artists also are represented in the show. They are:

• Don Williams of Youngstown, a camera man at WKBN-TV 27. His work, an acrylic on canvas is titled, "Jus Passin Thru."
• Stella Zeigler of Youngstown. Her work, an oil painting, is titled, "Place for a Vase?"
• Lela Coope of Canfield. Her work, an acrylic on canvas, is titled, "Muybridge Figure."

Smaller-scale drawings reveal artist's power of personality

Friday, January 20, 2006
Zachary Lewis Special to The Plain Dealer

Painting is Matt Dibble's claim to modest fame in Northeast Ohio, but it isn't his first love. Pencils, pen and ink were his tools well before brushes and oils, and they've never been far from his hand.
The drawings themselves have remained even closer. Ever since his days at New York's Cooper Union School of Art, Dibble has tended to reserve his drawings exclusively for family and friends, insisting they were too personal for the general public.
But there was one friend who insisted on sharing. Christopher Pekoc, a prominent local artist and an art instructor at Case Western Reserve University, championed the drawings and convinced Dibble to exhibit them.

"The drawings have a basic power," Pekoc says. "They come from a place that's totally honest. The paintings, too, are impressive, but they don't pull me in the same way these strange figures do. The lines in the drawings are so sure, and the proportions are very attractive."

If Dibble was shy about his drawings, at least he didn't have to transport them very far. He found a willing venue directly across the hall from his downtown Cleveland studio: a new multipurpose gallery called Studio of Five Rings. Founded in October 2004 by Youngstown native Matt Cook, Five Rings does triple duty as a winery and a martial arts school.

It's not a large space. Pekoc had more than 100 drawings to choose from, but was forced to narrow the show down to 15 pieces.  Each one of them, however, reveals an exceptionally confident hand. Faces, bodies and other shapes overlap in multiple perspectives in a way that recalls the cubism of Picasso. Yet their sparseness and bold outlines call to mind Chinese brush paintings. There are even traces of Surrealism in a stitching pattern Dibble occasionally employs.

Strangely, though, the drawings bear little or no resemblance to the rest of Dibble's vast output. In contrast to the paintings -- large, colorful abstracts -- the drawings are black and white and essentially figural. All but one are small, too, roughly the size of an average sheet of typing paper, while any one of the paintings alone could occupy an entire wall.

It's not immediately clear why Dibble sheltered this body of work from the public. There's nothing intimate about the compositions themselves, nor do their titles ("Pointy Idiot," "Without Fire," "Taller Every Second") give away anything particularly confidential.

Still, the artist had his reasons -- and pretty good ones at that. Dibble says all those fragmented figures represent various aspects of his personality, aspects that aren't necessarily flattering.
"I know that once people see these, they're going to come up with deep psychological interpretations about me," he says. "But the fact is, the spiritual, sacred things, they always come to me at the oddest moments."
Lewis is a free-lance writer in Cleveland.

The Persistence of Matt Dibble

August 30th, 2006
By DOUGLAS MAX UTTER

Printmakers, sculptors, those who excel at drawing all who practice the visual and plastic arts are closely related in terms of temperament; and yet there are definite frontiers between each mindset, guarded by mysterious affinities.

Matt Dibble, for instance, is a painter. Since his 1978 graduation from Cooper School of Art, Dibble has splashed around in several manners on innumerable large and small canvases. Since the quality of the painted line has been his most abiding concern through three decades of strenuous effort, you could call him a drawing guy, rather than a painting guy. But that would miss the point. For a painter's painter like Dibble, versed in the tensions of modernist work from Cezanne to DeKooning, the central activity of his art is to choreograph an ever more intense dance involving these two eternally incompatible partners.

The long stretch of art practice is something like dreaming. It takes place as much in the mind as in the studio, and time travel is commonplace. In recent large paintings on canvas, Dibble returns to themes and techniques that have preoccupied him since the age of 13, when he began a series of small line drawings. Those involved fantastic people and animals, mythic in feeling and rendered in a simple, uninflected graphic style reminiscent of Henri Matisse, or Jean Cocteau's vivid sketches of Paris café life. New paintings like "Year Without a Summer" and "Chinese New Year" are mostly about wrapping the pictorial space in a maze-like warp of precisely executed black lines. A tightly packed series of bluish vertical columns form a background grid in another recent work titled "Bushwhack." Flickering in front of these are lines that evoke a mythological scene. Toward the center a head is flung back along the broad body of a beast whose legs terminate in hoof- or foot-like appendages. Other faces hover, upside down or sideways, among marks that could represent landscape features. The total effect is like a vision of unknown constellations, mapped across swathes of a digitally cloned sky.

Dibble's earlier paintings belong in the context of late 1970s "Pattern and Decoration" artists. He shares that movement's interest in orderly, colorful visual movement, both as a pop-like gesture and as a fact of worldwide craft decorative cultures. Added to this is a whiff of the brash figurative imagery typical of Chicago's "Hairy Who" painters like Jim Nutt and Roger Brown that influenced many Cleveland artists who came of age in the 1960s and '70s.

The return that his current paintings make to early ideas hints of the long series of purely abstract styles that intervened. A re-examination of abstract expressionism gave rise to complex paintings like his "Quarry," which won a juror's mention from art critic Peter Plagens at this year's National Midyear Exhibition, recently closed at Youngstown's Butler Institute of American Art. A tribute to Willem DeKooning's 1950 masterpiece "Excavation, Quarry" is exactly the same heroic (80-by-100-inch) size and, like its model, is a complex weaving of brushy graphic incident and form, filling the available space with brush strokes, half-buried images and the bones of old art.

Dibble's studio at 2400 Superior Ave. is a large, clean, windowless space, full of all kinds of paintings. Oil on canvas works predominate, but there's plenty of variety. Arranged along a shelf are several smaller panels that are not only painted, but smeared with a sub-flooring compound, scraped across pieces of the construction material Celotex. And the shelf itself is part of a large group of experiments in presentation. Sometimes Dibble will incorporate a magazine-sized painting into a free-standing structure that looks like an Ikea end table.

For the past 20-odd years, Dibble has earned a living as a professional roofer. Physically the artist has been shaped and tinted by long days in the sun and constant upper-body exercise. Glinting behind glasses, his blue eyes focus cautiously, and a white arc of T-shirt curves across his chest like freshly gessoed canvas. A Drew Carey brush-cut completes his somewhat deceptive persona.

Not as typical is Dibble's longstanding devotion to esoteric meditative practices, which must also have a bearing on his fascination with visual repetition. In conversation about his work and motives he stresses issues of practice. He remarks, "I'm interested in what it shows me about myself. Immediately when I start to work I want to fall back on something known." And he touches on the deeper reasons for his uncommon perseverance: "Mystery isn't the problem, it's the answer. How do you open to the feeling? I see there's something that's nourished in me [by certain approaches to the work] and I try to push. You have to be persistent; you don't know what it is, but you're preparing for something."

Dibble will keep on painting and honing his skills as long as there's paint in the world and something to spread it on. In terms of his career, he hasn't been completely ignored this year's recognition at the Butler Institute follows a Best in Show award he received there in 1993, and his work was accepted into three May shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art in the early '80s. But an exhibition record that stretches back nearly 30 years and includes shows at SPACES (in 1984) and other major area venues should merit a higher profile.

Look for Dibble's work at St Paul's Church South Wind Gallery in Cleveland Heights early next year, and also at his studio during shows at Superior Gallery which is in fact a neatly enclosed corner of his space.