PAINTINGS 1961-1975

NOVEMBER 11th to DECEMBER 19th, 2015

525 WEST 26 STREET NEW YORK NY 10001 T 212 695 0164 F 212 695 0672 LORETTAHOWARD.COM

Thomas Downing: Way of the Dot

Phillip Romero, MD2015

(Revised from 1979 original)

Thomas Downing, photograph by George DeVincent

Installation view Thomas Downing at Loretta Howard Gallery 2015

Like a Zen Tea Master, Thomas Downing accepts painting as a lineage disciplinehis colored dot paintings offer a place to slow down, to stop the mental and emotional distractions of everyday life. Downings radiant dot paintings operate simultaneously on levels of systemic complexity and elegant simplicity that are both calming and exhilarat-ing.

In 1975, Thomas Downing was living on The Strand in Galveston, Texas. I was a budding medical student and artist infatuated with Ad Reinhardt, Marcel Duchamp, Buddhism, Asian culture, and eager to meet real artists. Another Galveston artist, introduced me to Tom. I recall sitting at Toms long table and gazing across at a massive dot painting behind him as we began what turned out to be a three hour conversation about art, culture, mind, and the relativity of perceptiontopics that we explored throughout our friendship until his untimely passing in Provincetown in 1985.

Downing saw himself in continuity with Barnett Newman. He told me of his visit to Annalee Newman after Barnetts death and how she gave him some of Barnetts brushes. Downings attitude toward art rever-berates with Newmans writing from On Modern Art: Inquiry and Confirmation (1944):

Installation view, left Fold Seven, 1969 right Ring One Saranac, 1971

modernism brought the artist back to first principles. It taught that art is an expression of thought, of important truths, not of a sentimental or artificial beauty. It established the artist as a creator and a searcher rather than a copyist or maker of candy.

Downings canvases resonate with the tradition of painting as a ve-hicle for personal and cultural reflection. The emotional intensity found in Abstract Expressionism is transformed into vibrant beauty charged with mystery, and hope. He cut through the trappings of emo-tionalism without denying the intense experience of emotions them-selves. He was not reacting to history, but nourishing the vital human connection to life, truth, goodness and beauty that can be reified in painting.

Untitled (13163), 1961

Early in his career, in Washington, D.C., Downing was impressed with Kenneth Nolands circle paintings. Taking the circle as inspiration for his own vision, he arrived at the dot. He said the dot seemed right for methe feeling of the actual painting of dots, of a gesture which was rhythmic and constantly oscillating seemed right. And the way a dot would isolate an instant of color and repeat it over a broad field gave the equivalent of an electric chargethe surface would pulse and come alive. Reflecting on his fascination with the dot, Downing believed it may have begun while he served in the Army, 1951-54. During that time he worked with oscilloscopes, devices in which cathode ray dots pulse across gridded video screens to produce linear wavesthe ultimate application being the television tube. Downing often mused, Seurat invented the television!

Installation view, Ring Seventeen, 1969

This exploration resulted in the consolidation of color, and space into a single form, the dot. By placing it on a field of unpainted canvas he made visible the unseen building blocks of the cosmosparticles of matter-energy vibrating in empty space. The all-over dot patterns invite us to peek into the subatomic structure of Cubist and Abstract Expressionist fields. In 1979, Downing explained, Where previously each circle was separate and distinct, now there is a merging which is so complete there is scarcely any distinction made at all. Instead of skipping and jumping there is a steady, precisely rep-etitious pattern of cresting waves. Altogether, in terms of composition and color, there is an intensity, a depth, which I dont think I have touched before.

Installation view, right Ring Seventeen, left, Position 2-25-75, 1975

In choosing the dot as his signature vehicle for painting, Downing ac-cessed a simple shape charged with symbolic meaning and global cul-tural energythe dot could represent wholeness, a point on a line, a heavenly body or atomic particle, or the point of focus for mindfulness and contemplation. It can simultaneously represent phenomena in the external world and singular or cosmic consciousness.

Ring One Saranac, 1971

In 1979, I began taking classes in Urasenke Chado (a school of Japa-nese tea ceremony). Japanese tea ceremony masters cultivate a prac-tice of timelessness comprised of four principles: Harmony, Respect, Purity, and Tranquility. As the chaos of history unfolds, a Tea Master continues his tradition of preparing tea, offering it to others, and drink-ing it himself. It is a highly disciplined path of repetition, participa-tion, reflection and exquisite attention to subtlety and endless varia-tion. Downings way of painting parallels the Tea Masters Way of Tea. A deep sense of tradition runs through Downings art. Tom made it clear that making paintings is a contemplative arteven a healing artpredating the mindfulness practices of yoga and Buddhism by twenty-five thousand years. Downings dot fields enter our body through the optic tract, and like the Tea Master's tea, can nourish, warm, soothe, and inspire us. Imbibing tea is an evanescent experiencedrinking in a Downing painting through the eyes is instantaneousand it can linger for minutes, hours, or years.

The magic of his compositions can change ones perception of time and space. Gaze long enough for them to imprint on the optic nerve and one can see them vibrate even on closing the eyes. The lumi-nosity of Downings paintings passes beyond our visual cortex into the neural networks of emotion and memory, kindling the imagination, inspiring reflection. Downings paintings begin with the eye and emerge into the radiant beauty of mindfulness.

*Shositsu, Sen. Philosophy of Chado in The Urasenke Tradition of Tea (Urasenke Foundation 1971).

In a cave near the entrance to the Chauvet Cave paintings is a Red Dot Panel, apparently painted by one artist applying the pigment to his right hand and printing the Dots onto the cave wallperhaps repre-senting a mammothaccording to scientists, the dot panel does not appear to be random. Dot painting has been around for 40,000 yearsperhaps a reflection on the human creative minds endless search for simplification of meaning.

Untitled, c. 1971-72

Tom Downing died in 1985, a year before the young Damien Hirst began his 25 year exploration of his Spot paintings. Hirsts Spot paintings, at first glance, are reminiscent of Thomas Downings Dot field paintings. In a private interview, 2003, at his opening for Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, I asked Hirst if he had ever seen Thomas Downings Dot Paintings, to which he replied, No, Ive never heard of him. I can imagine that Tom would be delighted that someone else became inspired by the dot or in Hirsts case the spot. Downing had a fantasy of an exhibition of endless paintings in a vast space that could reveal his explorations across time. He speculated, Ideally, the exhibition would be shown in spacein a circular space station where you could also look at the earth as a Dot. Downing did not see this vision realized, but Hirst, in 2012 at Gagosian Gal-lery, mounted a global exhibition, The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, fulfilling his own longstanding ambition to show the works together. Hirsts diversity in art and his capacity to produce and exhibit art on a global, industrial scale is unsur-passed. His life-long preoccupation with death is explored in virtually everything he makes. His spot paintings, which are made by his assistants, are cadaver like. What they reveal is just how radiantly alive a Thomas Downing dot painting is.

Downings Dot paintings, (1959-1980s), explore the grid, the ring, the cluster, the mandala, the boundaries of dots, their direction, size, location, the seen and the unseen. Downing made it clear that the most important aim of his work is the activation of creativity in the reflective mind of the onlooker. Like Marcel Duchamp, Downing felt the art is not complete until the onlooker perceives it.

Reel, 1961

Words from Buddhisms most sacred text, the Prajnaparamita Sutra (Heart Sutra) seem to describe the essence of Downings art:

form does not differ from the emptiness, and the emptiness does not differ from the form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form; the same is true for feelings, perceptions, volitions, and consciousnessuntil we come to no realm of consciousnessthere is no wisdom, and there is no attainment whatsoever. There is no obstructionno fear, and (we) pass far beyond confused imagination.

Installation view, right Untitled (13163), 1961, left Position 2-25-75, 1975

Downing paid attention to everythingthe seasons, weather, how light affected his paintings. During a summer visit with him in Prov-incetown, while he was staying at Hans Hofmanns house, we walked through a garden of burgeoning flowers and I could see that these colors were finding their way into his new paintings, paintings that could fit seamlessly in a space station or a Zen monastery.

Fold Seven, 1969

The vibrancy Downing created with his Dot Paintings continues to inspire new viewers that are fortunate enough to sit down and let their mind and body explore a spontaneous journey of excitement and con-templation.I had the honor of getting to know Tom Downing and when I first wrote this essay in 1979, Tom annotated it with the following note: Im inspired by many different artists throughout the varied expanse of art history, some seemingly unrelated to my own work, some as far afield as Vermeer or Velazquez or the Tibetan Padmasambhava. There are very few artists who have survived the test of time whose work does not transmit something of value to the sensitive receptive eye. Ul-timately it is not any given style but that mysterious, elusive element called content, which carries over from one generation to the next. It is something which the passage of time seems to enhance rather than diminish.

Installation view, left Untitled (13163) right Reel, 1961