Reconcilable
Differences:
A painter and a poet collaborate
Married by both metaphor and law, Tom and Lisa Dowling have collaborated
to produce hybrid artworks that melt the lines between painting, sculpture
and poetry.
Tom, an artist who
has actively exhibited in the art world for the last 30 years, has integrated
Lisa’s poetry into the bodies of his paintings, sculptures, and
onto vessels to produce a new union of image and metaphor.
A multi-published poet, Lisa has created books, altarpieces, and textiles that carry Tom’s images and designs along with her words. Together they have forged a marriage and a creative life that has enhanced a layered partnership between the arts.
Images need words to give them life, a real presence and form. The two
cannot exist without each other: form and its definition, figure and
its explanatory function, fallible object and its corresponding symbol.
The marriage of art and poetry has always been tenuous, too difficult
to merge without somehow diminishing the value of each entity. Our challenge
was to integrate the two genres into artwork that seems amplified by
the union, not compromised.
Painting, sculpture, and poetry all too often are so complex on their
own that their multiplication can lead to overload. Our goal is to somehow
arrive at reduction after addition: a spareness and elegance that is
rich with metaphor.
