Original Monochromatic Oil on Canvas by Eric Gibbons 
30"x30" 
 
This body of work spans nearly two hundred paintings created over many years, each constructed within a confined, box-like space. These enclosures are not prisons but chosen boundaries—sites of focus, pressure, and accountability. Within them, the human figure is compressed, contained, and fully present. Each painting functions as an allegory. Objects, gestures, and poses recur not as symbols to be decoded, but as a personal visual vocabulary shaped by lived experience. Vessels hold, ropes bind and support, columns carry inherited weight, and hands offer, resist, or receive. The figures do not perform for the viewer; they negotiate with their circumstances. The work is autobiographical without being illustrative. Rather than depicting events, it records internal states—moments of devotion, doubt, intimacy, sacrifice, and self-definition. Religious and mythic references appear not as belief systems, but as inherited frameworks through which identity, morality, and expectation are examined. By limiting space, color, and narrative, the paintings resist spectacle. The box removes context in order to reveal presence. What remains is the body as a site of tension: between strength and vulnerability, isolation and connection, autonomy and responsibility. Taken together, the series is a long-form meditation on what it means to inhabit one’s life consciously—to choose containment over chaos, attention over escape, and meaning over ease.