Artist:
Bill Gingles
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Bill Gingles was born in Louisiana, USA in 1958. After living in different parts of the country growing up and as a young adult, Gingles now lives and works in Shreveport, Louisiana. He received his MA from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana.
Gingles’ painting-based practice combines the intuitive, esoteric, and holistic aspects of Eastern thinking, with an interest in the materiality of paint and the processes of painting itself. Working intuitively, Gingles improvises a painterly search for spiritual synthesis through the elements of painting, a process he describes as “a moving balance between controlling the painting and allowing it to lead the way. The magic is in finding a way to let go.”
More concerned with the language of colour, line, form, texture and symbolism than with representational images, pictorial space in Gingles’ paintings is composed with layers of thickly trowelled, scraped and scumbled paint and delicate layers of washed colour within which he arranges a vast array of abstract painterly motifs, including esoteric prims, medieval arched doorways, ladders, floral forms or ’life shapes’ signifying spirits or souls, tessellated grids, and spontaneous gestural marks. The arched doorways are an occasionally recurring motif which the artist sees as symbolic of portals between realms; places of transit from one level of consciousness to another. Given their tomb/womb symbolism, Gingles attributes these passage ways with a specifically feminine creative nature. The resulting paintings express the “dynamic equilibrium” of the immaterial realm, appearing as if caught in mid-evolution – in the process of becoming.
Like Wassily Kandinsky whose seminal aesthetic treatise, concerning the 'Spiritual in Art', posited that the language of abstraction was capable of expressing deeper truths and communicating them to all five senses, Gingles’ paintings function as catalysts for the transmutation of painterly matter into spirit. Describing his practice as “vague and privately shamanistic,” Gingles’ work is concerned with inner realms wherein line, shape and colour become significant in themselves, and through what the artist describes as an alchemical process– spirit and matter are transformed in the crucible of painting. In this sense, his experimental, emotive and deeply personal compositions are unrelated to objective reality, created as they are, from an innately personal expression, and the desire to establish a direct physical and sensory experience of painting.
Bill Gingles’ paintings have been in numerous exhibitions across the United States and in London and are included in many important private and corporate collections, including; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; The Longview Museum of Art, Longview, TX; Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA; First Energy Capital Corporation, Calgary, Canada; Iberia Bank, Dallas TX and Simplex Investments, Chicago, IL.