It’s a chicken leg, mounted on a wooden board like a hunting trophy or a piece of taxidermy. But then something else is going on with it, a cascade of white circles, dynamic enough to almost seem to be moving across its surface. For some, the circles might seem like soap, the leg being washed clean. For other, they might look like mold; the chicken left out of the fridge too long. Or what if someone decided not to interpret it at all? To just accept the shapes and shades for what they are, just patterns across the chicken’s skin?
Any interpretation or engagement is fine with the artist, Craig Gilbert, who has an exhibition of his work up at Neverending Books through the month of August.
“Whatever you see it as, that’s what works,” he said.
Gilbert has been making art his entire life — “since he could drag a crayon across a wall,” he writes in his bio, and hit on the concept behind his Flow pieces a few years ago. Since then, as his bio puts it, “his Flow art has been featured in newspaper articles, beer labels, coffee shops, art galleries, breweries, outdoor art exhibits, and homes around the country.”
The Flow pieces started as black-and-white pieces that were almost meditations for Gilbert. Then, both inspired and goaded by a comment made at City-Wide Open Studios before the pandemic, he began adding color — first by blowing pigment onto paper through a straw and adding his designs. A friend asked him to decorate a birdhouse for a benefit, which led to interest in using other three-dimensional objects in his work, like skulls and fake food, like crackers and small slices of pizza. As he kept exploring the concept, he began stacking canvases to give pieces a more three-dimensional quality — “2D-plus, as I arrogantly called it,” Gilbert said — and using a series of small canvases to round corners. He has also used two-dollar bills as canvases, collected from his bartending gigs over the years. “No one wanted them when we cashed out at the end of the night,” Gilbert said. He volunteered to take them. “I had a stack of twos and I was counting them,” he said, and noticed their “amazing, beautiful, detailed etchings, and it’s just basically a really ornate frame. And I thought, ‘negative space-wise, what’s in there?’ ”
For Gilbert, whatever object he’s using quickly loses its context; it becomes simply a “convoluted canvas” for him to work with. “It’s just different canvases for different moods.”
Meanwhile, “the pattern itself, although it started out as a doodle, has just taken on something that is a lot deeper,” Glibert said. Then checked himself. “To get into the depth of art is so cliche sometimes I want to punch myself in the face,” he said. But “the more I sat on, the more I thought about it, or felt it,” the more he felt that he was playing with designs that felt elemental. “It’ll go on fake food, it’ll go on a skull, it’ll go on a two-dollar bill, and it’ll work.” Though, he added with a laugh, “when I try to make it work, it doesn’t work.”
What’s the difference between trying and doing? “Very few things really come out gung-ho for you or for anyone else if you push it too hard,” GIlbert said. “I’ll sit there and dwell on a piece, and if I try to make it go a certain way, like on the piece paper, I’ll wince. I’ll know it.” Sometimes he gives himself a line to follow, the curve of a pencil just to add a direction to his pen.” The time he spends on it is “meditative,” first developing the “main body of it” and then “obsessing over certain spots.” Sometimes he looks to add dimension, or build depth, using different widths of pen. He adds detail, texture, “rippling in the flow,” he said.
Gibert doesn’t worry about what it means, which makes encounters with viewers all the more enjoyable. At, say, City-Wide Open Studios, “someone will come in and say, ‘oh, bubbles,” he said. “And the next person will come in and say, “oh, I see you’re working fractals. I’ve had people describe it as a topographic map. Or it’s stardust, what you see through the Hubble.”
But he remembers one particular viewer at City-Wide Open Studios most clearly, an early teen who looked at Gilbert’s work, gasped, and ran out. He returned with his parents, who saw Gilbert’s pieces and flinched. The kid started laughing.
“Mom, what do you see?” the kid asked eagerly.
“Well, I’m a germophobe, so all I see is germs,” the mother replied.
The mother was “visibly shaken,” Gilbert said, while the son was “glowing.” His abstract art had brought the kid “to a place of anti-authority,” he said. “That’s beautiful.”
Craig Gilbert’s Flow pieces are up at Neverending Books, 810 State St. Visit the bookshop’s website for hours and more information.