The Gib Singleton Newsletter

Almost five years in process, the new hardcover biography and catalog on Gib and his work is available in galleries and the Gib Singleton Museum of Fine Art this week. Softcover versions are in transit from the printer in Verona, Italy, and should be in galleries and the museum just after the first of the year.

Here’s a quick preview from the jacket notes . . .

Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance art historian, argued that artists are born and not made. And that was certainly true of Gib Singleton. The child of illiterate sharecroppers, Gib somehow decided even before he could read or write that he would become an artist – and that through his art, he would change people’s lives.

No one knows where that determination came from. Like the visions that so often inspired his sculptures, it was simply always there. But we do know it

compelled him to create the art movement known as Emotional Realism, and was the force behind his successful quest to integrate spiritual art into mainstream collecting in North America.

That journey was difficult and often traumatic. Gib’s single-minded pursuit of his art resulted in failed marriages and not infrequent financial ruin, while the deaths of two of his children drove him to the edge of madness.

But through it all, he never faltered. Gib’s work was his therapy and his studio the refuge where he poured his grief and rage, along with his love and hope, into his bronzes.

Through photos of his work, recollections from family and friends, and stories and reflections from Gib himself, Opening the Heart offers insights into the man, his art and his hopes for future of humanity.

Opening the Heart

“Tech capo” Roberto (center) and his crew dial in the press for the first signature page.

Paul Zueger signs off on the first signature run!Photos by John Goekler

Paul Zueger checking the color values on a signature sheet.

By John Goekler

Gib was a 29 year-old high school teacher when he received a Fulbright to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. At the time, he had never been further from Granite City than Niagara Falls on his honeymoon, and to be invited to study in the country where an estimated 70 percent of the world’s greatest art resides was almost unbelievable to him.

His year at the Accademia shaped Gib in a number of important ways. First, his instructors honed his ability to work in extreme realism. “Man, we had to put in every freckle and every hair,” he said. “It was in the classical tradition going all the way back to when Vasari talked old Cosimo himself into creating the place. And it’s the same tradition Michelangelo

and Cellini and Giambologna worked in and taught when they were there.”

The Accademia also exposed him to Michelangelo’s Prisoners – the “unfinished” sculptures intended to decorate the tomb of the tomb of Pope Julius II.

“They weren’t unfinished,” Gib said. “They were the first abstract sculptures in the world. He was making a statement about what it meant to be human. To carry that weight and to struggle to free ourselves from the material world. The faces aren’t finished because he was using contrapposto to show that struggle instead of expression.

“He was also making a statement about what it meant to be an artist prevented from doing his own work because the Popes and other powerful guys kept forcing him to do stuff they wanted, not what he wanted. One time the Pope even sent soldiers to Florence to drag him back to Rome for a commission. When they pushed him into the Pope’s audience, he wore a rope around his neck to show he came as a prisoner. When I saw those pieces, and I saw how much emotion they expressed through what they left out, I knew I wanted to work that way, too.

“I grew up as an artist in Italy,” Gib said. “I lived on the Via de Benci, right by Santa Croce Cathedral. And every day I’d walk to the Accademia, and I’d go by a tower designed by Giotto, a fountain by Ammannati, a marble by Cellini . . .

“When you see that kind of art every day, it really makes you look at your own work, and realize you have to raise your game. You have to step up or go home. It makes you competitive, in a good way.”

When Gib returned to Granite City, he decided he had to take the plunge. “I figured, how the hell can I teach it unless I know I can do it? I

need to go out and try to make it as an artist.” He resigned his teaching job and opened the East Bank Art Gallery.

The gallery struggled for a couple of years and ultimately failed, but Gib never looked back. He knew the course his life would take now, and he knew he had what it took to do the art he dreamed of. He would not be a prisoner, nor trapped in a life that wasn’t his own.

The Gib Singleton NewsletterSpecial Edition 2015

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Bella Italia

Michelangelo’s “Atlas” in the Accademia Gallery, Florence, carrying the weight of the world. Photo by John Goekler

Donatello’s David in the Bargello, Florence. The piece that inspired Gib to take up bronze. Photo by Daniel Bell

Via de Benci. Photo by Daniel Bell