BOB TOMLINSON
“Love and Other Sorrows”
October 5 to October 23, 2010
Opening reception Saturday, October 9, 3-6 pm
Coffee and conversation with the artist, Saturday, October 23, 3 – 4 pm

Chelsea, NYC: Viridian Artists is pleased to present recent oil and collage paintings by Bob Tomlinson on the ironic theme: Love and Other Sorrows. The exhibit opens October 5th with a reception on Saturday October 9th, 3-6 PM. The work will be on view through Saturday October 23rd. The artist will be at the gallery on Saturday, October 23rd, the last day of the exhibit, for coffee and conversation from 3-4 PM. The artist’s canvases combine oil paint with elaborately textured and printed papers, as well as computer manipulated photographs. The sensuous color and bold, sinuous contours of these elusive and lyrical paintings play on the tension between figurative references and abstract forms. The painter believes that there is no clear distinction between naturalistically depicted or abstracted figures. As art critic Lawrence Downes wrote: "Tomlinson employs classical anatomy as a vehicle for gestural abstraction." Focusing on form and rhythm as formal autonomous entities, the artist sets his figures hovering in baroque atmospheres awash with subtle color harmonies. Tomlinson’s themes are substantial and implore us to search our memories and connections to myth as well as to reality, but they are executed with an elegant surface treatment that often belies the anguish & emotions that lie deep in the layers of the work. Bob Tomlinson is a Jamaican-American painter born in Brooklyn, New York. He has shown widely in Paris, London, Amsterdam and New York and is represented in many international public and private collections including those of the Clark-Atlanta University Museum, Dr. Maya Angelou, Dr. Richard Long, Lord and Lady Hirshfield, M. Franco Trecanni di Montichiari, Mme Linda Weil-Curiel and Herr Waldo Klick. A graduate of Pratt Institute and the CUNY Graduate Center, he is also a scholar of French Literature and Aesthetics and has lectured and published in both disciplines. He figures in the recent book by Cynthia M. Dantzic, 100 New York Painters (Schiffer, 2006), and is the subject of a projected film by the well-known documentary filmmaker Louis Massiah.