Lyric Abstractions of David Tobey,
A Painter, Sculptor, & Violinist with Deep Larchmont Roots

Until June 7, Tobey's work is on display at Gallery@49

by Ed McCormack of Gallery&Studio

(June 5, 2003) Authentic energy has been in short supply in recent painting. In an aesthetic climate crippled by self-conscious strategies and cunning ironies, it takes an artist as committed to intuition and spontaneity as David Tobey obviously is to demonstrate that raw immediacy and lyrical exuberance can still thrill us in contemporary art.

Indeed, the power and presence of Tobey's work is almost startling in his recent solo exhibition of mixed media paintings and welded steel sculptures, " The Structure of Energy," at Gallery @ 49, 322 West 49th Street.

Tobey comes by his lyricism via a unique confluence of formative experiences. The son of the distinguished history painter, muralist and long-time Larchmont resident Alton Tobey, he began painting in his father's studio at an early age, and later earned his Masters in Studio Art from the College of New Rochelle. But it was equally obvious early on that he was musically gifted, so he also graduated from Juiliard an accomplished violinist. Today, David Tobey approaches painting as he approaches music­­ that most naturally abstract of all the arts: He rides the rhythms in his canvases and reigns them in, much as a composer controls the ebb and flow of a symphony as it is coaxed into being. As with a piece of music, this involves a synthesis of spontaneity and restraint, as he works and reworks the composition, balancing its various elements until they coalesce in a dynamic chromatic and formal fusion.

Through such means, Tobey's compositions achieve the visual equivalent of a truly symphonic sweep, with their flowing forms and vibrant colors writhing muscularly, rising to a rhapsodic pitch. One can compare such energetic pyrotechnics to those of Jackson Pollock, an artist he greatly admires. Much to his credit, however, Tobey does not ape the earlier painter’s mannerisms. In fact, even though his painting technique involves the pouring of paint as well as manipulation of pigment with a brush, the biomorphic sensuality of his forms comes closer to Arshile Gorky, while the collage elements­­ranging from photographic images, to torn sheet music, to bits of twisted wire, to shards of wood, and other found objects­­that he affixes to some paintings are more akin to the surreal automatism of Alfonso Ossorio.

Along with his musical inspiration,Tobey assimilates a variety of art historical precedents to forge a personal style in which the overriding feature is his ability to harness energy and manipulate form to his own ends. He cites a variety of diverse elements ­­ Rubens’ sensually "intertwining figures"; the "space around Rembrandt’s figures"; the "giant expressive shapes" in Picasso’s "Guernica," and even the wild style graffiti that proliferated in the New York City subways in the 1980s, when he was a student commuting back and forth to Julliard­­as influences on his work.

In his welded steel sculptures, created with scrap metal, it is as though the often baroque shapes in his canvases have broken free and moved out to command three dimensional space. Indeed, technical considerations aside, his concerns are remarkably consistent in both mediums. Thus, of the pieces he creates in the workshop of a man who owns a metalworking company and is, incidentally, one of his violin students, he says, "I work mainly with the concepts of balance, motion, and interacting and intersecting planes in a three dimensional space... I work with these many varied shapes and start to feel and hear the inner sounds of rhythm, wind, and melody. I know a sculpture is done when this process of sound and motion makes a dimensional and fluid transition from one section to another in the sculpture."

Granted, it is unusual to hear a visual artist speak of "sound" in relation to his work, but in Tobey's case it makes perfect sense, since the musicality in both his sculptures and his paintings is undeniable. His use of acrylics in his recent paintings facilitates the flow that makes his forms appear to be in a state of constant flux, for their characteristic liquidity and fast drying properties enable him to achieve an exhilarating sense of freedom and spontaneity. His uninhibited approach to color, in which he layers strokes, drips, splashes, and slashes of strident reds, yellows, and blues, along with softer secondary hues, in linear skeins over the surface of his canvases contributes further to the intense kinetic energy of his compositions.

Indeed, few painters today manage to generate as much sheer visceral excitement as David Tobey does in these new canvases, with their shapes and colors flowing expansively in configurations that often resemble stately energy constructs more than formal compositions, making the title of his present show seem especially apt. For Tobey’s paintings seem informed by an innate, deeply intuitive sense of structure rather than by any conscious
attempt to impose order or design. Yet they are possessed of a peculiar, rough-hewn beauty, with passages of breathtaking lyricism juxtaposed with a sense of compressed inner violence so pronounced that it gives the impression, at times, of threatening to explode the canvas off its stretchers.

Aside from the aforementioned photographic fragments in some mixed media collage paintings and the boldly scrawled figurative references in paintings such as "Study in Red, White, and Blue," specific images are infrequent in Tobey’s work. Yet his forms are sensual and allusive after a manner that makes it possible to Rorschach an entire world of possible meanings into them. Indeed, the art of David Tobey fairly bursts with life, which makes it
a welcome anomaly, as well as a vital alternative to the present surfeit of art about art.

Ed McCormack is the editor of Gallery&Studio and will be publishing an article on David Tobey in the June/July/August 2003 issue. David Tobey grew up in Larchmont, attended Mamaroneck High School and now lives in New Rochelle.