Portfolio ~ Tom Barnes

Artist Bio

Tom Barnes received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of South Florida and currently teaches at The University of Alabama. He also taught for two years at Valparaiso University and in a summer program at The University of San Carlos in Guatemala City, Guatemala, where he received Recognition for Educational Advancement and Cooperation. In addition to teaching Figurative Modeling and Three-dimensional Design, he devotes his time to the practice of painting, although he is also an accomplished sculptor. He lives and works in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Marfa, Texas.

His paintings and sculptures have been in over 165 group and solo exhibitions. His work is in the permanent institutional collections of the Alexandria Museum of Art, Southwest Texas State University, The University of Alabama, Stillman College, Indianapolis Museum of Art, University of Utah Museum of Fine Arts and the Pentagon. Corporations that have collected his work include the Energen Corporation, Economic Development Corporation of Alabama, The Burdines Corporation of Florida and the Business Center of Alabama. Other public collections include the Porter County Arts Commission, Valparaiso, Indiana, the Chattahoochee Valley Art Association, La Grange, Georgia and the Arts Council of Tampa, Florida. He is also in numerous other public and private collections.

Artist Statement

In creating the techniques needed to express my ideas, I have focused on the physical immediacy of paint. The originality of the structure of my paintings is the result and the revelation of what is essential. What is essential is unknown, but can be sensed. What is sensed, I believe is heightened by the arbitrariness of the image. The image coming from chance and intuition has an appearance of reality, but seems fleeting and works immediately and strongly on the sensory system. As perceived it is an image that appears like a hallucination experienced on the threshold of consciousness. Recognizable forms are conjoined with abstract forms in such a way that one is not sure of the visual experience being navigated. Although at first glance what is perceived is an ordered arrangement of visual phenomena, there is something irrational in the imagery. Objects of awareness of a known reality seem to be emerging from the movement of paint or the paint is pouring out of and away from the known. All forms seem to be exchanging or sharing the same visual information. Within these paintings, butterflies do not light on flowers, but on bananas; pelicans sit not on pilings, but among snow-covered tires, which are merging with the flow of the paint. In these paintings there is no narrative, irony or intentional symbolism. It is the recreation of an event, an event that affects states of consciousness regarding objects of consciousness. How the perceived event and the objects of consciousness affect the senses, ultimately loops back to the physical immediacy of paint, and by engaging with that, what is essential is experienced.