Ewan gibbs biography sampler

Ewan Gibbs (British, b.1973) is known for the intimately-scaled, meticulously-rendered drawings he creates employing a unique visual language he developed nearly twenty years ago.

While still an art student in London, looking closely at Pop Art and intrigued by the found image, the artist happened across a book of knitting patterns. Printed in black and white, this book broke down the composition of a given pattern stitch-by-stitch, with different marks (circles, triangles, hatch marks, etc.) indicating different colors of yarn.

He quickly adapted this knitting shorthand and began making drawings using travel brochures as source material, selecting images in the brochures for their composition and translating these found photographs, mostly of hotel rooms, into drawings.

The resulting images were recognizable at a distance, while they became abstract and fleeting up close.

The artist expanded his source material in the following years, beginning to make drawings after his own