Tom Relth (b. Los Angeles) is a Vancouver, Washington-based painter working in large-format abstract and figurative work on linen, canvas, paper, and wood panel. Drawing from both early European painting traditions and Japanese Nihonga techniques, Relth has developed a singular process rooted in materiality — grinding minerals, mixing his own paints with specialty glues and resins, and incorporating dry pigments sourced from ground earth minerals: cobalt, malachite, iron oxide, ochre
etc. Often these raw minerals are sintered or calcinated** to perform as paint pigments.
A painter and art educator, Relth's Series 7 emerged from his time teaching in Morocco — a body of work that carries the heat, color, and sensory richness of that experience into abstraction. His paintings invite sustained looking; surfaces that shift and reveal themselves slowly, like something geological rather than made. His work has been exhibited at the Portland Art Museum’s Rental Sales Gallery and in galleries across the Pacific Northwest, Los Angeles, and in Casablanca, Morocco.
Who's That Girl, Luckygirl Gallery's inaugural exhibition, included two works from Series 7 — Series 7-1 and Series 7-2 — where the textures and tones of North Africa live quietly within each layer of paint.
