Tom Berg

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“Tom Berg’s work has always addresses itself to a tension between the dimensional and the flat, but these tensions are now internalized in the painterly approach which absorbs the figure into the field. At the same time, the mood has become more serious, complex and disquieting” (Art space magazine, 1984, Wade Wilson). The chair long reigns in Berg’s catalogue of real images. But the images, for the most part, merely serve as a vehicle for him to study patterns of light, shadow and color as they rake across a surface; therein lies the enduring power of his painting.

Website

http://tombergpaintings.com/

About

Tom Berg is a Santa Fe artist best known for his paintings of chairs which have been a focus of his work since the first chair paintings of the late 1970’s. However, his work has incorporated subjects as varied as farm animals, architecture, clothes lines, swimming pools and hand tools, all painted in a manner that moves between modes of landscape painting, still life painting and portraiture.

He often paints his subject “alla prima”, although it’s treated in a manner somewhat skewed from a traditional approach to still life and landscape.

This work is characterized by its frontality and emphasis on the picture plane, and the artist’s attention to the geometry of composition, always executed with painterly brush work. The focus of the work seems to be more about confrontation and presence than with the look or identity of the objects portrayed, and the paintings move from humor and irony to contemplation and a kind of pathos .

In a catalog essay, the Taos critic, Tom Collins said of the work:

“The object of our gaze is the chair, but the chair is not the subject of the painting. Tom Berg’s “chair paintings” as they are correctly yet inaccurately called, are so easily seen that they are nearly invisible.

.....we have looked at these chairs, grouped and alone, open and folded, lounging poolside, draped and spectral, stately on the lawn. We recognize them so readily, know them so intimately.

The chair is empty, always. It is passive, vacant and appealing. It beckons an occupant. The eye “reads” it, sinks into it, lazily, without protest. The eye rests. Life exists just outside the edge of the painting and is suggested fully by its complete absence. The painting is active, sometimes haunting.

At times, as we study the architecture of the chair, the thing we know as “chair” becomes completely unrecognizable, just as a word will, when repeated over and over, cease to be intelligible.”

Tom Collins, October 1997