Max Gimblett: Freedom Encapsulated

The Gimblett is a distinctive language. It has changed over time – but much like a river does in changing course. “It’s a natural flow,” he tells me. “It changes with the season and certainly every year. I gave a lecture recently at Auckland Art Gallery on 55 years of practice and I was amazed at the amount, the range and all the different shapes. It looked to me like the work of two or three people!

“I paint gestural painting coming out of Bill [Willem] De Kooning and Japanese sumi calligraphy. I take the attitude of ‘all mind no mind’. You can think before and after, but not during the action of painting. The act of painting is in the fifth dimension. It’s more like dance, more like gymnastics than anything projected.”

An 83-year-old gymnast is quite different from a 24-year-old one. For the first half of his career, Gimblett says he did everything, including stretching his not-inconsiderably-sized canvases. He’s not capable of that now. Energy with his assistants has become increasingly important. However, the generosity he extends through his work and person remains potent. “I’m feeling a little bit of aging for the first time in my life! [But] I try to act like a 46-year-old,” says the artist. “Basically, a man shifts his ground in his mid-40s, with his midlife crisis. He shifts into gear for a very happy, very successful second half of life. The ground is shifting but I’m still giving four workshops to 80 to 100 people here in Auckland at AUT now… There’s definitely a wisdom that comes with experience.”

For AAF 2019, Gimblett is presenting oil-based high colour screen- prints on aluminium. Some are one of a kind, others are editions of 20. The form remains calligraphic, within his hallmark quatrefoil shape. Gimblett says the quatrefoil came to him in a dream in 1983 (“It said ‘Paint me, and I’ll heal you” he told a journalist last year of that midlife moment).

“The quatrefoil is an Indian tantric mandala, a female cross, a Christian middle ages form. It was on the pews of Saint David’s Presbyterian Church in my childhood,” continues the artist. “It is also a symbol of a South Pacific plant form. I’m one of the very few painters using this shape – and that is a mystery.”

This article was originally published in Auckland Art Fair Special Edition Art Collector, 2019.