City Zen

Edwin Gamble at the Maine College of Art

By Chris Thompson

“Edwin Gamble: A Maine Master” is at the Maine College of Art’s Porteous Building; 12:00 to 5 p.m. Tues. – Sat.; 879-5742.

“Untitled”: Edwin Gamble, 1999, oil stick on gessoed paper.

In 500 B.C., the Buddha had found simplicity only after sacrificing worldly pleasures, and much fasting and meditating. In one of his first sermons, which may be the first and finest act of performance art, the artist formerly known as Prince Siddhartha sat holding a flower, and spoke not a word — how could his words approximate the intricacy, mystery and beauty of that little blossom? Nothing is so difficult to achieve as simplicity. Late in his life, artist and Maine native Marsden Hartley made an effortless line drawing that he promptly sold for a huge price. Someone asked him how he could charge so much for something that only took a moment to make. Hartley replied that he had worked his entire life in order to be able to make that drawing.

Well into a lifetime of art-making, Edwin Gamble creates the kind of work that often goes unnoticed. Calm and serene, refined but humble, they don’t command your attention. But if you take the time to give it to them, they envelop you. At the opening of his show, critic Philip Isaacson gave a short, compelling talk in honor of the 78-year-old artist. He compared him to Hartley, referring to them both as “Maine masters.” He spoke of a day spent with Gamble years before, strolling along some stretch of Maine shoreline, watching the birds that made their home there. Gamble was at home too. He held the names of every bird at his fingertips. He could match each of their distinctive calls. Isaacson swore that Gamble could actually will certain birds to appear.

In Gamble’s “Untitled” (pictured), his measured drag of an oilstick accomplishes the same feat, willing a tiny shorebird to emerge from the textures of a black gessoed ground. The placement, thickness, and direction of each line are handled so deftly that they permit us to become admiring naturalists like him, to join him in watching this bird balance the rounded volume of its breast above its spindly legs as it pokes around in the dunes at its feet. In one of his larger drawings, he uses seven or eight stark sweeps of sumi ink to stitch together another waterfront portrait. The horizon is laid down in just two watery strokes, kept from touching each other by the presence of the bird standing still at the image’s center. Its body is defined by two slow arcs that are held apart by the two dashes representing the bird’s faint but sturdy feet.

In all of his drawings, as well as in his wood and bronze works, Gamble seems intentionally to come close to, but ultimately to resist, using symmetrical compositions to achieve his complex balances between forces and forms. Instead he distills shapes and contours, their movements, and the space between them into a deceptively simple vocabulary of marks. He orchestrates them with the kind of economy that can only come from a lifetime of intimacy — both with his media and his subject matter. Indeed these birds aren’t his models so much as they are his friends, unique individuals that have over the years come to be close companions.

This attention to his companions’ individuality is apparent in one of the larger images, “Flight of Pigeons.” Looking more like four pigeons mid-flight than real pigeons ever could, the drawing is crafted from four separate dense tangles of sumi ink that play off one another like a jazz quartet: each contributes a rhythm that works beautifully with those of the others but is still entirely its own. Gamble makes music from what most of us would hear as noise.

Even if you prefer the bliss of ignoring the contemplative world in which Gamble’s work is immersed; even if art, Buddhism, and bird-watching aren’t your bag, there’s another reason why those of us roosting in Portland ought to know his name. About seven years ago, back when Congress Street was no man’s land, Gamble gave the Maine College of Art an anonymous gift of some $525,000 to make its renovation of the Porteous Building possible. Instead of buying a boatload of birdseed or a luxury yacht with his half million, he invested it in the education of future artists and in the reinvention of Portland that is now well underway. Just something to bear in mind, months from now, as you sit in the summer sun in front of any of the new cafes that have sprung up in the last couple of years, sipping iced latte, and shooing the pigeons away.

Chris Thompson teaches at the Maine College of Art and is a juror for this spring’s “Greater Portland Regional” exhibition at Maine Artists’ Space. He can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.