Tom McGlynn

About

Tom McGlynn is an American abstract artist whose oeuvre explores interactive color and proportion in tension with their potential semiotic meaning. He is also an independent curator and a writer, contributing regularly to The Brooklyn Rail. Furthermore, McGlynn is the founding director of Beautiful Fields, an organization dedicated to socially-engaged curatorial projects. He is currently teaching at the Parsons New School of Design in New York City. He lives and works in the NYC area. Education Born in 1958, McGlynn became interested in drawing at an early age. His talent was encouraged within his family and he eventually enrolled Ramapo College in New Jersey, earning a BFA in printmaking in 1980. In 1996, McGlynn obtained his MFA in painting from Hunter College. As an undergraduate student in his twenties, he was influenced by both art and literature, especially by the works of the artist Robert Smithson and the poet William Carlos Williams who both lived a formative and meaningful part of their lives in NJ, where McGlynn grew up. Technique The painter utilizes a language of forms he receives from his physical environment. Inspired by signs, logos, architectural patterns, and other contemporary visual patterns and shapes, he offers new, pared down interpretations of common imagery. His style is ostensibly formalist, or, more accurately, post-minimalist, but beyond these labels, he conceives of the work in terms of their immediacy and phenomenal (optical and tactile) presence. He rigorously hand-paints his works, slowly applying layers of acrylic to wood panel, canvas or paper. At first glance, the work may appear to be too precise to have been hand-painted, but a closer look reveals brush strokes and subtle tactile shifts left by the artist's hand. The structure of his current body of work is mostly determined by the rectangular format of the support. McGlynn prefers to keep things formally simple in order to derive an implicit complexity of meaning, thereby openin