Mark Tobey, Famous Artist

Edge of August, 1953, Mark Tobey.
Casein on composition board, 48 x 28" MoMA

"I wouldn't wish fame on a rat!" Mark Tobey, after winning the most prestigious Venice Biennial City of Venice prize.

Mark Tobey (1890-1976) was an abstractionist whose interest was centered on form. That is profoundly confusing to me, since my own feelings about abstraction are that form would be almost the last element the artist wants.

Tobey is the guiding light of the Northwest School artists, and pre-saged Jackson Pollock.

Mark Tobey

A short synopsis of his achievements:

Tobey won international acclaim for his work towards the end of his life. He became the first American since James Abbot Whistler (1834-1903) to win the Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale, an award he won in 1959. In 1961, he had a retrospective showing at the Louvre in Paris, an extraordinary tribute to the work of a living artist. These landmark achievements were followed by a major exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1962 and, in 1974, another major show at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Art critics and historians in the United States have long been uncertain exactly how to categorize Tobey. Many gave Pollock most of the credit for creating the all-over style. Others have suggested that Tobey's internationalism and even his religion have so far kept him from being accepted in mainstream art circles.

Reference.

Short Bio via the Peggy Guggenheim.

Long bio via Washington State's HistoryLink.

Committee Mark Tobey.

MoNA (Museum of Northwest Art)

Art & Critique

Casey Klahn

Casey Klahn

Casey Klahn

The arrival of a critique is a welcome thing for a working artist. Elijah Shifrin at Art & Critique has chosen to render a sensitive review of my abstracted landscapes.

In "Casey Klahn: How to Make Your Audience Weep," the critic sees some uncannily true aspects of my art that I haven't consciously voiced before. He seems to have nailed the elements of my landscapes in deep and psychological terms that unearth my artistic formative years.

How does Shifrin know that I grew up drawing hours and hours a day, in the land of the pouring rain? He writes:

...some of the pieces appear as if seen from behind a car’s front window when it’s raining. Objects (trees) look heavily smudged, lines break down and some areas of color appear to be still in the process of modulation. Second is the use of pure blue reminiscent of the sea; the patches of blue indeed bring to mind large bodies of water. And third is the thick, streaming down lines of the trees, resembling water pipes. All of these characteristics deal with water and raindrops in one way or another.

That large body of water was the Pacific Ocean, where I grew up in the land of giant conifers, and constant rain. The only rainforests in the lower forty-eight states, in fact, where my stomping grounds.

Much is made of the diffused and ambient lighting present in the works by artists of the Northwest School. Tobey, Callahan, Graves, et al. That love of gray, and the tendency to describe light without a direct source, or without cast shadows, has been my style as well. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, eh?