Jach: Starting at the beginning …
When did you first realize you wanted to paint and draw?
Gilbert: Let’s see … I’ve been
painting and drawing all my life, since I can remember. When I was
five I was always drawing. I would just go through reams of paper
sometimes, just drawing things all the time.
Jach: Do you know why? Can you
remember back? Why was it so important to you?
Gilbert: It was fun. I think it
was a positive escape. You know, I just had so many things in my head
– in my imagination. I wanted to get them out, and somehow I think
they wanted to get out, too. I would go to museums – I loved to do
that – I would go to museums and see the art. I would just stand there
and stare. It was really fascinating to me. It stimulated me.
I wanted to do that. I wanted to
take all these pictures inside my head and put them on paper. I wanted
to see them outside of me as well as inside of me. I wanted to be able
to put the pictures out in front of me and just look at them – like I
did in the museum.
Jach: What kind of pieces did you
first draw?
Gilbert: A lot of science fiction
things – rocket ships, robots, and fantasy things like that. Like most
kids, I was fascinated by futuristic and prehistoric things. I was
fascinated by dinosaurs and by all those things of the “scientific
world” inside a kid’s head. So I started drawing those things in a
sort of fantastic way.
Jach: Do you still have
any of those things? Do you still have any of your childhood
drawings?
Gilbert: I don’t
personally, no.
Jach: You don’t?
Gilbert: My mother
may…who knows?
Jach: Do you remember
if those early drawings had the surreal quality that your work has
now?
Gilbert: They were
drawings of my imagination. I don’t think they had a particular style.
I wasn’t so interested in drawing pictures for their own sake. I
wasn’t trying to make a statement or anything. I wasn’t interested in
drawing the things that were around me so much. I wanted to get the
images out of my head and onto the paper so I could see them, so I
could play in that world more easily.
No, I don’t think they
were surreal. They were just me. You know, I didn’t set something up
to paint. I wasn’t trying to reproduce something that was real.
Most people learn to
paint by setting up the things they want to include in the painting.
They try to copy – they try to reproduce what is tangibly there. They
work to develop a style or an expression.
Not me. I just wanted to
bring the fantasy in my head into the reality of my bedroom. So, no, I
doubt that they were surreal or that they represented any style for
that matter.
Jach: So you never did
do still life paintings with flowers and things?
Gilbert: Well, I did
some still life, not flowers and things, mainly faces and things. But
I would just make them up out of my imagination. No one posed for me,
that’s for sure.
Jach: Do you think you
always knew from the time you were very small that you’d be an artist,
or did you ever have sort of something in your mind like, “Ok, I’m
going to be a doctor,” or whatever?
Gilbert: At one point I
seriously thought I might be a scientist. I now realize that my mind
isn’t structured that way. …{Laughter} … But I was always skilled at
art. At school, they would always pull my drawings and, by that time,
put my paintings in the art shows. I got a lot of encouragement for
that. I gained a lot of skill just from the encouragement, I think. I
know I gained a great deal of motivation from it.
Jach: So it was all
self-taught at that point, then?
Gilbert: Oh, yeah. As I
look back now, I never thought about my art as an occupation so much
as a thing I had to do as part of my self-expression. I always had a
drawing board set up somewhere, or an easel.
Jach: When did your
work move away from the “scientific thing” into the more magical and
visionary quality it now has? I know your work is always evolving, but
when did the visionary quality begin? When did it start happening?
Gilbert: Probably back
in the early ‘60s. Pictures of angels, and other Symbolist-type
images, showed up in my mind and subsequently came out in my work.
I would just sit down
with a blank sheet of paper, and these images would just manifest
themselves. I mean, I would draw them, but they would almost seem to
be coming out of the paper just as I was drawing them on the paper. It
intrigued me no end.
I started getting a little
interested in metaphysics at that time, too. You know, I studied a little
Hinduism and Zen. I read some Alan Watts. That sort of thing, not heavy.
So it sort of crept into my consciousness there.
I was also in a period of a
lot of self-examination. I was still a teenager when all this happened.
As we all do from time to
time, and as teenagers do a lot, I was looking at the meaning of life
…(laughter) …but while I was looking, it seemed that there was a point – a
point about life – that everybody around me was missing.
I almost became obsessive
about trying to find out what that “something missing” was. I wanted to
know why we exist and all that. Now I realize everyone goes through all
that, but then I thought I was the only one who knew “something was
missing.”
I had to find the answer.
People all around me were living shallow lives in a sterile world. I was
living in Southern California at the time. …(laughter) … There were a lot
of very uptight and conservative people who lived all around me. They
seemed just very short-sighted. It just seemed to me that there had to be
a whole lot more depth in the world out there somewhere. I was missing
it.
There was no nature around
me. At that point in my life, there were some big pieces missing. I tried
to find it in my painting.
Jach: OK, so a new kind of
imagery shows up in your work. You are beginning the first steps of a
mental and philosophical search to find something meaningful. And that’s
when work took on much more of the visionary quality that it has now?
Gilbert: Right.
Jach: At some point you
must have gone from always having that drawing table and sketch pad set
up, because it was so absolutely necessary for your self-expression, to
realizing that you were going to be a painter for the rest of your life.
When did that happen?
Gilbert: Probably when I was
living up in Mt. Shasta. I think it all crystallized up there. My style
just came through. All the pieces fit together. Suddenly I had a style
that was mine. I had a style that I liked and a style that seemed to
express what I wanted to say. Also, I found technical
instruments like an airbrush and a more effective understanding of color …
a few things like that. It all fell together along with my
philosophy at that point. I knew what I wanted to paint.
At that time, I started
doing some paintings just for myself. I had a job painting little pictures
on leather garments … [laughter} … just to make money. So I started
painting paintings for myself. And everybody seemed to really like them. I
put them up in a local store, and people really responded to my work. I
was surprised and very happy. And the people responding were not just the
people coming up to Mt. Shasta looking for Lemurians living in the
mountains, either … {laughter} … so I took them down to the Bay Area.
First came notecards. Then my originals began to sell. The feedback was
wonderful. That’s how it all began.
Jach: It seems like what
you’re saying is that the philosophy and art came together all at once. At
that point in your life, they kind of crossed paths really … and you
realized this is what I’m going to do in this lifetime. Avocational or
vocational, this is what you were going to do.
Gilbert: Yes. I got in touch
with a certain part of my soul, I think, and it was not so much because of
the philosophy everybody was spouting around there. No, it wasn’t the
particulars of the philosophy at all. It’s just that I started having
experiences up there that were definitely metaphysical experiences. They
overshadowed my cynical/critical mind. They were more real than my
cynical/critical mind. And I could not deny the realness of those
experiences.
I was seeing people’s auras
and all sorts of things. Also, I would fall into this elevated state of
consciousness from meditating. You know, just being around people who were
into metaphysics all their life … I’d get stuff from them that was really
other worldly. There were some people there who really had very powerful
emanations, even though I didn’t particularly agree with everything they
said or believed. They were very powerful and impactful.
Jach: They put out a
resonance…
Gilbert: You have to
understand that at that time, even though I was interested in metaphysics,
I had not seen a lot of proof, and a lot of it seemed like fairy tales.
Now it is different for me. Metaphysics is real – very real –to me now.
But then it was different. But while I was there, I had some experiences
with people where they actually … just being with them … my consciousness
raised almost involuntarily. It was sort of what people call the shakti
thing.
Jach: There’s a question
that I have to ask about the whole creative process for you. When you
start to paint a painting, is it already a full picture in your mind, or
does it unfold as you go? Does a painting stay the same in your mind and
on canvas from beginning to end, or does it change?
Gilbert: It changes.
Sometimes I’ll start with a very vivid image, and I’ll try to paint it,
and by the time I’m halfway done, it’s actually mutated.
It’s like a dream changes as
I paint. It’s very fluid like that. The whole composition could change,
turn from a day scene to a night scene, for example. It’s very fluid, and
if I try to structure it to really try to reproduce the initial vision,
I’ll lose that initial vision eventually. Unless I’m doing a real small
painting where I could do it real fast, I’ll usually lose it – and if I
try to force it, it’ll get like really stilted. That’s where I lose the
quality sometimes, so I have to trash the whole thing sometimes. But if I
let it flow, it’s a lot of fun.
Jach: Have you ever been
really surprised? Like you started to paint something, and what came out
was different and surprising to you?
