page_title: Gibson Byrd
section_title: Themes and Styles
hierarchical_section_title: Gibson Byrd / Themes and Styles
caption_attribution_description: English: Through the Glass (1970s), pen and ink on paper artwork by Gibson Byrd exploring his Shawnee heritage
context_page_description: Decatur Gibson Byrd, was an American painter of Shawnee ancestry known for landscape and figurative paintings. He was a master of coloristic subtleties and atmospheric effects, and his work often emphasized social commentary and injustice, and the angst and banality of modern materialism.
context_section_description: Byrd’s interest in figurative painting started in the early 1950s, and this work emphasized social realism, angst and banality in the twentieth century, and auto-biographical fantasy.
  Early influences on Byrd included the abstract expressionists and modernists Lyonel Feininger, Willem de Kooning, John Marin, and Mark Rothko, as well as the realist Edward Hopper. Around 1980 Byrd turned away from a narrative, psychological approach and focused his work on the rural landscapes, receiving widespread recognition for this shift in style that emphasized composition, lighting, and mood. These landscapes mostly focused on rural southern Wisconsin (including a 10-foot square oil painting modeled on a landscape near Cross Plains that welcomed passengers to the Dane County Regional Airport for more than a decade starting in 1988), and coastal southern California, near Carlsbad, where he retired to in 1991. His strong feel for landscapes was in part derived from his Indian heritage - his grandmother was a Shawnee Indian and he was a qualified member of the Shawnee Tribe. Although best known as an oil painter, he also worked in other mediums, notably gouache and pastel.
  An artist-observer, Byrd’s work explored human loneliness and isolation, frequently provided social commentary, showcased social fairness and justice, and often lampooned the status quo and materialism. “His subject matter is very much of our time: anomie and alienation, military service and domesticity, flashy commercialism and enduring values; the interrelationship between the artifact and natural environment and formal invention”. Byrd’s work in the 1950s reflected an interest in interiors and everyday life. By 1962, he was increasingly concerned about the implications of his Shawnee Indian ancestry, a topic he returned through throughout his life and explored through social commentary that emphasized racial bias, and the national struggle for equality (for example “Incident”, an exhibit-winning piece which was hung in the Madison WI mayor’s office, and "The Difference"). In the early 1970s, Byrd shifted inward working autobiographically exploring life stages. Subsequently, he painted spartan and geometric interiors, often populated with strange assortments of figures, animate and inanimate, clad and unclad, conveying a perceptible aura of unease.
  In a haunting series of paintings and a poem, Byrd explored his complex feelings toward a Tulsa home. It was where he grew up, and where his father died when Byrd was 10, and a year later his older brother died in the same house. As he noted in a 1976 interview, “Memory is an emotional creature. It changes as other things change. It expands and contracts… I have been trying to bring about some meeting of the past and present.”.  In doing so, Byrd painted the house as it appears today and in the conflicting ways he remembered it.
  Artistically exploring his Shawnee heritage was a recurring theme. In doing so, he would “sort of fool around with the idea, putting past and present together in various combinations”, even showing himself as a Plains Indian, an intentional inaccuracy (1976 interview). A particularly vivid memory he drew upon was a pow wow his Shawnee father took him to when he was around seven and his disappointment that people were in working clothes and not full regalia. “I realize looking back that I probably attended a ‘real’ pow wow not a public one. But I still remember the drumming.”
  Byrd shifted to painting rural landscapes in 1979, soon after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He noted “It is liberating. It lets your sprits soar at bit” and that “The quality of light is very amazing to me”. These elaborately layered, and richly evocative scenes often had atypical lighting conditions, with highlighted rear-lit trees, shadows cast by the rise and set of the sun and moon, and rare violet haze. They also reveal a mastery of implied perspective, defining nuances of distance through glowing planes of subtly differentiated color, often vibrating with deep and complex emotion (see examples). As his physic
caption: Through the Glass (1970s), pen and ink on paper artwork by Gibson Byrd exploring his Shawnee heritage
exif: {"Image Tag 0x000B": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image Make": "Apple", "Image Model": "iPhone 7", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image DateTime": "2020:06:12 11:38:46", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "2346", "Image Padding": "[]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "96", "Thumbnail YResolution": "96", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "6120", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8851", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/32", "EXIF FNumber": "9/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "32", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2019:02:18 10:30:36", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2019:02:18 10:30:36", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "86105/17248", "EXIF ApertureValue": "54823/32325", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "19136/5339", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "399/100", "EXIF SubjectArea": "[2015, 1511, 2217, 1330]", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "594", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "594", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4032", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3024", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "28", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[4183519/1048501, 4183519/1048501, 9/5, 9/5]", "EXIF LensMake": "Apple", "EXIF LensModel": "iPhone 7 back camera 3.99mm f/1.8", "EXIF Padding": "[]", "EXIF OffsetSchema": "4236"}