Portfolio ~ Tom Barnes

Artist Bio

Tom Barnes received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of South Florida and is a practicing artist. His paintings and sculptures have been widely exhibited. 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. Public collections include the Porter County Arts Commission, Valparaiso, Indiana, the Chattahoochee Valley Art Association, La Grange, Georgia, the Arts Council of Tampa, Florida and numerous private collections. He lives and works in Marfa, Texas.

Artist Statement

My paintings reveal some aspects of experience that contain evidence of a reality that reflects how the world is most often encountered, as the mind is directed towards it--at the same time, they are images that hold the ambiguous. The squeezing together visually of what is and is not expected, in a way is like a hallucination experienced on the threshold of consciousness. This makes one not sure of the experience being navigated, because ultimately what is being navigated, that which is essential to knowing, only partially appears. And, that the images are oil paintings, revealing the physicality of paint, adds the awareness of material experience as both actual and illusionary. That all of this takes place on a flat surface as a pictorial event is of great interest to me.