Last spring, the exhibition “365” at the Kentucky School of Art showcased a series of self-portraits created by Gibbs Rounsavall ’94 over the course of a year. The twenty drawings on display were a small part of a much larger project, in which Gibbs challenged himself to create a self-portrait every day for a year.
The project turned out to be a challenging one. “There were days when I was sick,” Gibbs recalled, “or when the last thing I wanted to do was look at myself. As I tell my students, though, art making is problem solving.”
Gibbs added a caption to each self-portrait as he completed it, and he describes the series as “a visual diary of the year. Those captions take me right back to the day, sometimes even more than the drawings do.”
Although these pieces are a departure from Gibbs’ usual, non-representational work, he found the process reawakening his interest in drawing and painting from life. “I found myself falling back in love with representational painting,” he said. “I’ve started a series of landscapes, which is something very different from my usual work.”
For the last six years, Gibbs has taught visual art at Fairdale High School, where he was named the Most Influential Teacher of the Year in 2011. He has a solo show coming up in April at the Green Building Gallery and a group show in October at Spalding University.