| TOM CARTMILL FACTS | The Gallery, Peckover Hall, Leighton Park School, Shinfield Road, Reading RG2 7ED
21st Feb – 23rd March 2005.
Entrance Free. Mon-Fri 9.00am – 4.15pm. Viewings by appointment only.
Please phone midweek to arrange weekend viewing. Tel: 0118 987 9525 Tom Cartmill is a full time painter, who has been working from his 'Blue Door Studio' a former fire station and delivery office for Royal Mail, in Mortimer for almost three years, since his return from overseas. Since moving to Mortimer he has exhibited widely, locally and further afield, including London galleries and the critically acclaimed contemporary art gallery, ArtSway, in the New Forest. He has also shown at galleries in Spain and Italy. He has recently been invited to show at the Florence Biennale, Italy, this December. Tom will also be opening up his studio to the public again this May, after the success of his ‘Open Studio’ event last year. |
Visual artist Tom Cartmill is showing a series of large scale abstract drawings at The Gallery on the Park, Leighton Park School. Primarily a painter the drawings have evolved from the preparatory sketches he's been making for his paintings over the past year. Drawing has always been an important part of his practice, but it has been some years since he has concentrated on this discipline exclusively for a period of months. He says he has been able to take a divergent yet complementary direction to his painting, echoing and extending some of the themes and motifs that he has been concerned with over the last three years.
As far as the materials are concerned, this is a ‘back to basics’ exhibition. The word 'Convergences', the title of this exhibition, relates to the actual method used in making the drawings, where individual pencil lines are used in combination; working against, moving towards, joining up with each other. The word also refers, in a less literal sense, to the coming together of ideas and concerns which have recently preoccupied Tom. Echoing his interest in geology, the drawings embody the abstracted forms of the ever-changing landscape. Various forms and patterns encountered on his regular walks on the network of footpaths around his home in Mortimer (a village just outside Reading), are also evoked; the textures and striations found on tree bark, in furrowed fields; of a tree’s branches outlined against the sky; the movement of water in a stream, for example. Another concern dealt with in these drawings is Tom’s interest in visual perception. In particular, the idea that we can receive conflicting information from a given visual stimulus: Complex optical effects can be achieved with the simplest of means. He finds the subjectivity of perception fascinating. How one 'sees' the world is also modified and defined by the accretion of experience, and memories of those experiences. The drawings are slowly built up with one line juxtaposed with another until there are networks of lines working with and against each other. This way of working with lines can be seen to symbolise the inevitable layering of one experience/memory upon another and the physical processes of change through time, which have been recurring themes in Tom’s pianting in recent years. |
