neotericart

Thomas Masters: shelter
Thomas Masters Gallery
Chicago
December 4 – January 4, 2010

Moderate in scale, the current exhibition of watercolors by Thomas Masters at the Masters’ Gallery, hardly pretends to be a comprehensive retrospect of the artist. Rather, it provides a compelling, passionate glimpse of the artist’s recent central activity. “shelter” is a treatise on structures, now near lost, captured with grace in indigo blue and sepia. It works. It feeds into a philosophical pool. It provokes tranquility. And the exhibition as a whole, rolls from the jotted to the elegant.

Masters worked with abstract landscapes for a while, without being indebted to placing human, or animal figures in his pieces. “shelter” embraces the skeleton of structures, habitats once occupied by humans, and now perhaps by wildlife, roughage, by dream and memory. Upon approaching them anxiety arises and questions, “is it safe to enter.”

With, “Marilyn’s House” the viewer feels the wind, hears its howl and blow. The twisting, forward strokes present a falling fence and debris, and wood and a narrow path to what was a house back and upward. The gray cloud pattern, coming with his mixture of colors floats above in the piece. The work speaks more to the artist’s previous oil paintings than the unforgiving of his current watercolors. “I love landscapes”, says Masters. “It’s a big part of all of my work. In 1997, I fell in love with abstract landscapes. I’d been painting without man, never putting figures into my landscapes.”

A 2000 visit to Tulum, Mexico, marked a turning point. There the artist absorbed the “palapus” or Mayan influence on older, abandoned structures. He came upon those built in a circular fashion, allowing air to flow and pass through with ease. “I was fascinated by this. I began to notice in how many places, these little structures resemble each other,” Masters shares. “These frail, some falling apart, shelters speak of another time. They resemble each other and it’s like looking at a ruin. For me, a theme developed.”

In, “Alcamo”, the artist’s execution of a series of reverberating strokes provides a grass forefront before a heavy brown apparatus like structure placed center of the work. Such “baglios”, archaic structures, are found all over Sicily. These “abondanato’s”, were a way to protect, barn-like, olive oil, sheep, an array of items, now dripping, in decay, being reclaimed by nature. Masters’ “Out of the Blue” takes on a Wyeth feel, a swept plane on which the artist takes the viewer into a valley, a vast plain washed in the gray the two mixed colors developed. He dabs, and his technique includes upward strokes, parting feather-like washed blue stream. The artist’s staccato strokes present a tree line, and above it a sky, it’s color taken away with tissue and sponge almost violent and visceral.

As this cycle progresses, Masters finds a rhythm. Singling out “Sayonara” and “Haiku” he utilizes a “sumie” technique, with minimal color and a single effort there is an ethereal, Asian flavor. The approach is a single effort, quick, continuous strokes. It must be done correct in the moment. “They come out right or you throw them away,” Masters adds. “They are not to be over worked.”

Masters has found his subjects in Sicily and Mexico, in Japan, and county sides globally. Some appear moments from falling, barely a shelter. “Subconsciously, it’s almost done.”

In traveling, the artist works with watercolor. “It’s just easier to work that way.” Yet watercolors have a way of being unforgiving. Do they ever fight back? “There are many times when you paint that you get lost’, Masters says, “Then you have to figure out a way to get out of it. Quand vous êtes demi de manière à travers le fleuve, il est juste comme facile à aller en avant quant à retournez, from the French, “When you’re half way across the river it’s just as easy to go forward as to go back. Or,” he closed’, “as Blake wrote, ‘if the fool persist, he could be made wise.’”

www.thomasmastersgallery.com