I use the term minimalism for a lack of better term. My preferred term would be reductive painting: a bare-boned formal approach to image making.
            A formally reductive sensibility has always been at the core of my art making. Growing up and being schooled in Southern California made its mark on me as well.
            The particular types of minimal art that emerged there, Hard Edge, and California Light and Space were the main influences on my aesthetic. My earliest paintings were influenced by the Hard Edge school of L.A. artists, as my first painting teachers were June Harwood and Fidel Daneli.
            Film, particularly narrative film and the way stories were told in the cinema.
            Through them I was exposed to the modernist ideas that became so important to my development as a painter. From their instruction I moved on to the University of California at Santa Barbara where artists as diverse as Howard Fenton, Howard Warshaw, Doug Edge and Richard Dunlap reinforced this pared-down aesthetic.
            In graduate school at UC Irvine I studied with Tony DeLap, John Paul Jones and Craig Kaufmann. The influence of each of these artists further cemented the reductive aspect in my work.
            Graduate school was a heady time for me. Some of my classmates were Kim Abeles, Jan Derek Taylor, Russ Crotty, Frank Dixon and Mike McGee. We were a highly productive group and the creative atmosphere at that time was intense. What I am showing on my web site under this heading are mostly art works from the 1970’s to the early 1990’s. More recent reductive and abstract paintings can be found under the heading “Abstraction”.

Tom Dowling 2008

Cantos

            Like many contemporary artists from Jasper Johns to Sandow Birk, I am intrigued by Dante Alighieri’s Cantos of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell. His authority at the beginning of the Renaissance and Modern worlds helped shape many artists and writers with inspiration and structure. Each generation seems to reinvent Dante’s art to suit current aesthetics. As a reductive artist interested in modernist ideas about form and content, I come to Dante with a great love of his literature but with a highly pared-down style. My version of the Cantos is more in tune with Color Field Painting.
            While living in Italy, I was captured by Dante’s narratives, but because I am a painter, I ingested them in visual terms. Because of this, and because I am equally interested in narrative and visual forms, many of my Cantos are diptychs and triptychs. I see them as linear constructions, narratives, but in the sparest of elements. Each panel contains both gesture and color, and each diptych or triptych moves from one panel to the adjacent panel subtly, much like Dante moved through his journeys. 

“Its entry from that point of the horizon
brought morning there and evening here; almost
all of that hemisphere was white—while ours
was dark—”
Canto I, 43-46. Dante, Paradiso

 

 

Every substantial form, at once distinct
from matter and conjoined to it, ingathers
the force that is distinctly its own,
a force unknown to us until it acts—
it’s never shown except in its effects,
just as the green boughs display the life in plants.
And thus man does not know the source of his
intelligence of primal notions and
the lids of all those shades, as untamed hawks
are landed, lest, too restless, the fly off.
Canto XIII, 67-72, Dante, Purgatorio

After those ardent suns, while singing so,
had wheeled three times around us, even as
stars that are close to the fixed poles, they seemed
to me like women who, though not released
from dancing, pause in silence, listening
until new notes invite to new dancing.
Canto X, 76-82, Paradiso

Here and Now

In the Spring of 2009 these artworks were
exhibited at @Space Contemporary in Santa Ana, California.
The exhibition, entitled “Here and Now”
consisted of artworks selected from the years 1989 through 2009.

            These artworks continue the interest I’ve had in geometric abstraction over the past thirty years. I continue to try to create an experience for the viewer that is unique. Building on the rich modernist tradition of reductive formalism, I try to tweak and push the form into something new. My inspiration for these images often comes from my experiences traveling and my observation and engagement with the architecture and art that I see. The titles occasionally reflect the original source of experience. My process of creating is a dialogue. I have “conversations” with art and artists, places, monuments, and literature. These discussions connect me to the ideas and issues of the past and cultures other than my own.