By arts editor HELEN MUSA

After more than 70 years of drawing, painting and designing buildings, Queanbeyan architect and artist Trevor Gibson will stage his first exhibition at the age of 85, and there’s a strong family touch to the show.

A Lifetime in Lines: Art and Architecture brings together paintings, watercolours, life drawings, sketches and selected architectural works created across seven decades, many of them emerging from drawers, portfolios and folders where they have been stored for years.

The exhibition is being curated by Gibson’s daughter, Helen Gibson, operator of The Queanbeyan Hive.

“Every drawer seems to reveal another part of Dad’s life,” she says.

“We might find a beautiful life drawing, then a watercolour or landscape, and underneath it architectural drawings from something he was working on at the time.”

Trevor attended art classes in Canberra as a young man and continued drawing and painting while studying architecture at the University of Sydney, where he was taught by Lloyd Rees.

Art remained a constant alongside family life and a long architectural career. Over the years he became involved with Canberra art groups, the Artists Society of Canberra and the Queanbeyan Art Society.

A Lifetime in Lines ranges across landscapes, abstracts, watercolours, observational sketches, paintings and a substantial body of life drawing, including large-scale works that have rarely been seen publicly.

A small selection of architectural drawings will also be included.

Now 85, Gibson continues to draw and paint.

“Creating something and making something, designing something that had something to do with how people lived and what they did during the day, how they worked, how they played, was all interesting,” he says.

“In particular, houses were interesting because people live in them.”

The exhibition has a special connection to its venue. Gibson’s archive includes architectural drawings from 1996 for the site that now houses The Queanbeyan Hive.

A Lifetime in Lines: Art and Architecture opens at The Hive, 274 Crawford St, Queanbeyan on October 2 with music by Magpie Hill and continues through October, concluding during the Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Arts Trail.

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