Edwin Gamble at the Portland Museum of Art - Portland, Maine - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, May, 1996 by Carl Little

From John James Audubon to Morris Graves, American artists have frequently been drawn to birds as a subject. Edwin Gamble has been bringing an abstract spirit to the tradition for a number of decades, as could be seen by this exhibition of nine sculptures and 10 works on paper created between 1957 and 1994. Gamble renders New England wildlife--terns, dowitchers, curlews, petrels, herons and other winged creatures--in a manner that captures their essential postures and actions. Whether or not his shapes are ornithologically correct seems beside the point when admiring their graceful, aerodynamic and sometimes comic appearance. Based on feather and flesh, they are avian through and through.

The sculptures in the show feature a range of surface textures. In Redwood Bird (1960), which brings to mind some of Bernard Langlais's rough-hewn animals, Gamble uses strokes on black paint on the redwood to accentuate the wings and head of the bird. By contrast, Scratching (1990) is as smooth as a Henry Moore. This sculpture, made of bronze with a greenish patina, can be read both as an abstract form and as a bird in the act of dipping its bill to perform the action indicated by the title.

Three pieces in the show are mounted on tall metal poles, to simulate birds in flight. This strategy is especially effective in Theban Pigeon, an applewood piece from around 1985, where the E-shaped bird slices sideways through the air. It might almost be a weathervane, except for its sculptural vigor.

Gamble's small works on paper, several of which are no more than 3 or 4 inches across, tend toward the oriental. The artist can make a few strokes of ink or gouache magically add up to birds or people, as witness two recent pieces, Woman Sketching (Mohegan) from 1993 and Conversation (1994). A standout among the works on paper is Take Off (1980), an energetically calligraphic Z shape (like the mark of Zorro) that expresses the energy of a bird leaping into flight.

A student of American modernist Andrew Dasburg and a four-time attendee of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture back in the 1940s and '50s, Gamble has shown his work throughout New England and as far afield as New York (he had a one-person show at the Egan Gallery in 1963). This latest exhibition confirmed that he has mastered the art of suggestion and captured, with studied aplomb, the dynamics of our feathered friends.