JOHN TOMLINSON

What I am doing

   My history as a male in the 20th and 21st centuries is filled with vivid memories of all the men in my life: father, brother, uncle, grandfather, teachers and mentors, male friends, drill sergeants, bosses. They are the male protagonists and antagonists I have encountered in a variety of private and public situations. I have an ear for what men say to men. I have an eye for their facial expressions when saying what they do and how they say it. Their voices, their expressions provide the rhythm to the music of my drawing.

   I believe that I am orchestrating an experience for myself, mapping my inner journey, leaving traces. Those traces have an element of darkness in them, with titles such as Modes of Escape, Dark Storms, and The Misery of Men, in which graphite and brush record my inner conversation about the misery of men and unravel my own deep experience as a man in the world.

   I have focused on exploring line and texture on paper as well as its simulation in animated digital video and iPad drawings. My drawing starts with the hand encountering a surface. The touch flows up the arm, through the entire body and mind, and charges back instantaneously to the hand, to express the emotions, memories, perceptions, knowledge and sensations it has collected and transformed along the way. 

   My work centers around the expressiveness of the face, representative of the self and the other. The drawing emerges at a fast pace as graphite strokes capture performative moments created by the dynamic interaction of elements with one another.    Each composition portrays a vestige of personal experience. As I seek my fundamental personal roots in drawing, I return to the three most encompassing elements in my lexicon: facial expression, the figure in motion, and the expressive hand.

   Although reasonably well-versed in the contemporary language of art and in the philosophies illuminating the end of a master narrative, I set aside those issues to zero in on a form that engages how I feel, see and think of time and my history in it.

   I love to draw and I love drawing in all its manifestations throughout the ages. For me, drawing contains the spark of life in every stroke and mark; it is the very beginning of knowledge and perception; it is the bridge from object and subject to an individual and then to all people.