Counter-Signs: The Paintings of Tom Brand. Art Review by Robert Kameczura

Peak Performance by Tom Brand. Click to enlarge.

Peak Performance
Oil on Wood (28" X 26")

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This painting suggests a mountain which is seemingly covered in structures resembling buildings, counter-pointed with another more distant and vaporous mountainous landscape behind it. The effect is to suggest an epic structure encapsulated by a grand landscape. Man's creative potential is juxtaposed with the vastness of nature.

Octagon
Oil on Wood (41" across)
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The artist found this frame in a trash heap — it was originally for a poker table.  It presented something of a compositional challenge, with the dynamism of a tondo and the faceted corners of horizontal painting. The design is a series of warm facets around a more coolly colored center, and it vaguely suggests the qualities of an oasis in the desert.

Octagon by Tom Brand. Click to enlarge.
   
Arcadia Revisited by Tom Brand. Click to enlarge.

Arcadia Revisited
Oil on Wood (48" X 32")
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Arcadia is defined as a place of beauty and tranquility. An idealistic bucolic paradise often used as a subject by artists and writers of the past. The band of rippling blue suggests coolness and a quality of refreshment against the warmer colors of the flat area before it. Plant like forms on the horizon suggest a quality akin to the hanging gardens of Babylon. This is a painting which contrasts aridness with fecundity, the hot and dry with the cool and lush.

   

Tondo VI
Oil on Wood (28" diameter)
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This is the last in a series of round paintings -- in them forms are interlocked with attention to the flow of color and free-formed "bridge passages" to connect them. The painting is meant to flow like a piece of music, with statements of shapes as themes, then developed sections in which these themes-shapes vary, and then recapitulate to take the form of echoes of the original shapes. Note for instance the red bars at the bottom of the composition echoed with variation by the greenish blue bars on the left. This is a painting of variations, counterpoint, and development: hard outlines alternating with soft organic forms. The whole work is a kind of visual music.

Tondo VI by Tom Brand. Click to enlarge.
Vinland by Tom Brand. Click to enlarge.

Vinland
Oil on Wood (36" X 27")
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The heavy impasto treatment and color is suggestive of wine country. It is said that the harsh conditions of some vineyards contribute to the quality of the wine, as the roots have to dig deeper and are thus more stable and productive and less subject to the vagaries of bad weather. The painting suggests rolling hills but also the shapes of grapevines struggling skyward. There is even a vague suggestion of a vinery towards the center of the painting.

 

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Artwork Copyright © 2003 Tom Brand
Text Copyright © 2003 Robert Kamezcura
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