This biography of Evelyn Gibbs RE, marks the tenth anniversary of her death, and is published to coincide with a retrospective touring exhibition of her work, organised by the University of Wales, School of Art at Aberystwyth. Evelyn Gibbs was a painter and printmaker, portraitist and war artist, etcher and engraver, illustrator of children's books and pioneer art educationist. She founded the influential Midland Group of Artists, was active in the Artists' International Association and the Women's International Art Club. Her book, The Teaching of Art in Schools, remained in print for over thirty years.Evelyn Gibbs: Artist and Traveller includes her early years in Liverpool, her scholarship at the British School at Rome, and her time as a lecturer at Goldsmiths' College. Evelyn Gibbs spent the war years in Nottingham, organising public art exhibitions with the AIA and there she married Hugh Willatt (later Secretary-General of the Arts Council). Gibbs was the founder of the Midland Group of Artists, organising major exhibitions of local and national artists. In later years she returned to London, living and working at the Trevelyan Trust studios. Her exhibitions were hugely popular and reviewed nationally, her work ranging from the most exquisite prints of landscape and figures to the late paintings of Gozo's saltpans.The book is illustrated by etchings, prints and drawings from throughout Evelyn Gibbs' career, many are in colour. Pauline Lucas is an artist, living and teaching in Nottingham.The travelling retrospective exhibition opened at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and ran until the end of 2001. The exhibition moved to the University of Liverpool Gallery in January 2002.
"(Evelyn Gibbs) is a romantic with a strong sense of construction, which never deserts her even when she is drawing mountains in moonlight or darkly shadowed fisher girls mending their nets. She is primarily a draughtsman and her drawings of architecture skilfully imply more than is stated."
"Professional, assured, accomplished... these are controlled paintings, owing much to Cezanne, something to Cubism but more to (her) evident pictorial excitement and curiousity... broad landscapes subtly expressed in moving gradations, either in paint or chalk"
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