BOB TOMLINSON
“Love and Other Sorrows”
October 5 to October 23, 2010
Opening reception Saturday, October 9, 3-6 pm
Coffee and conversation with the artist, Saturday, October 23, 3 – 4 pm

Chelsea, NYC: Viridian Artists is pleased to present recent oil and collage paintings by Bob Tomlinson on the ironic theme: Love and Other Sorrows. The exhibit opens October 5th with a reception on Saturday October 9th, 3-6 PM. The work will be on view through Saturday October 23rd. The artist will be at the gallery on Saturday, October 23rd, the last day of the exhibit, for coffee and conversation from 3-4 PM. The artist’s canvases combine oil paint with elaborately textured and printed papers, as well as computer manipulated photographs. The sensuous color and bold, sinuous contours of these elusive and lyrical paintings play on the tension between figurative references and abstract forms. The painter believes that there is no clear distinction between naturalistically depicted or abstracted figures. As art critic Lawrence Downes wrote: "Tomlinson employs classical anatomy as a vehicle for gestural abstraction." Focusing on form and rhythm as formal autonomous entities, the artist sets his figures hovering in baroque atmospheres awash with subtle color harmonies. Tomlinson’s themes are substantial and implore us to search our memories and connections to myth as well as to reality, but they are executed with an elegant surface treatment that often belies the anguish & emotions that lie deep in the layers of the work. Bob Tomlinson is a Jamaican-American painter born in Brooklyn, New York. He has shown widely in Paris, London, Amsterdam and New York and is represented in many international public and private collections including those of the Clark-Atlanta University Museum, Dr. Maya Angelou, Dr. Richard Long, Lord and Lady Hirshfield, M. Franco Trecanni di Montichiari, Mme Linda Weil-Curiel and Herr Waldo Klick. A graduate of Pratt Institute and the CUNY Graduate Center, he is also a scholar of French Literature and Aesthetics and has lectured and published in both disciplines. He figures in the recent book by Cynthia M. Dantzic, 100 New York Painters (Schiffer, 2006), and is the subject of a projected film by the well-known documentary filmmaker Louis Massiah.

Don Zurlo
“The Inconstant Illusion”
September 14 - October 2, 2010
Reception Thursday, September 16, 4-7 PM

Chelsea, NYC: Viridian Artists is pleased to present new work by the artist, Don Zurlo. Entitled “The Inconstant Illusion”, the exhibition of paintings opens Tuesday, September 14 and extends through Saturday, October 2 with a reception Thursday, September 16th, 4-7 PM. Throughout his art career, Zurlo’s paintings have always been in a constant state of change, morphing from one style into another, but always attempting to express the transient, random, and unpredictable events in the human landscape in which both animate and inanimate objects continuously interact in a state of flux. Fascinated with eastern philosophy while in college, he continued throughout college and in later years experimenting with ambiguous visual images. Working with black and white torn paper collages in an art class under Allan Kaprow at Rutgers, Zurlo presented bold images of organic forms that existed in an ambiguous state of figure/ground tension. In the following years he experimented with more complex imagery and techniques attempting to reflect the continual change in contemporary life and perceptions. In the current exhibition, he has abandoned all of these techniques, returning to a minimalist approach in which ambiguity is presented through simple acrylic images resembling the torn paper compositions of his student years at Rutgers. Still philosophical however, his paintings echo his view of reality for he states, “In many ways form is an illusion - our interpretation of an infinite variety of relationships between fields of energy. In our search for meaning, our minds create images from these forces, filling in voids in our perception from the vast library of our personal impressions and experiences.” In addition to studying with Allan Kaprow as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, he worked with Robert Watts in the graduate fine arts program at Douglas College where he earned his MFA Degree. The artist taught at both South Carolina State University and Allen University in South Carolina and now is a full time artist. If you would like further information or photographs, please contact the gallery.