Luckygirl Gourmet Gallery presents 'Rocks are Hard, Water is Wet', an exhibition of paintings by Tom Relth, a body of work moving fluidly between abstraction and natural realism.
Relth's eye was trained early. At ten, he took first place in an all-school art exhibition, coached by his father, a painter trained at the Chicago Art Institute, who pushed him to "look" and "see" before drawing, and who insisted Tom develop on his own rather than fall under the influence of an established style. That instinct, to look hard and trust what surfaces, still drives the work.
After earning his MA in Fine Arts from California State University, Fullerton, Relth spent thirty years in the commercial world, first running a design and advertising agency, then founding an international specialty printing equipment company. In 2003, he returned to painting full time, incorporating Nihonga, a traditional Japanese technique built on ground mineral pigments, often mixed with acrylic mediums and resins of his own devising. In 2008, he left business altogether to teach art to high school students in Casablanca, Morocco, for five years, an exchange with students and contemporaries that continues to inform his practice.
Relth now works on large, commercial-scale canvases and panels in acrylic and mixed media, folding complex, recognizable forms drawn from nature and everyday objects into traditional tube paint and dry mineral pigment. Scale matters to him: he wants to get inside the picture plane, to become immersed in the place of the painting. Abstraction, simplification, and arbitrary color guide his hand — a cadmium yellow sky is as valid as any other. Atmospheric light, or the sense of matter at its beginning, often surfaces unbidden.
As Relth puts it, sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. He steps back from a painting to find what troubles him, and knows a work is finished only when that irritation quiets. He trusts his gut to keep painting, confident he'll find his answer on the other side of the forest.
