"David Tobey is both
a professional musician and painter. As such, his works explore
the synaesthetic relationship between abstraction and music,
the connection between linear and musical rhythms. Music has
always played a major role in his outlook and life and artistic
inspiration."
David
Tobey became a professional violinist almost by accident, when
the only music school he applied to - Juilliard - accepted him.
Visual art was his preferred calling, but his parents, thinking
the violin would provide a better living, urged him to choose
music.
They
spoke from ample experience. Mr. Tobey's late father, Alton Tobey,
was a muralist and painter of historical topics. His late mother,
Rosalyn, was a concert pianist with a large private teaching
studio in Larchmont, where David was raised and Alton lived.
Happily, the road not taken reappeared several years ago,
when the younger Mr. Tobey, who lives in New Rochelle, became
the Orchestra Director at the New Rochelle Middle Schools.
A master's degree was a requirement for the job, so Mr. Tobey
studied studio art at the College of New Rochelle, receiving
his degree last year. All the while he continued his freelance
music gigs, playing regularly with the Westchester Philharmonic,
wedding bands and Broadway pit orchestras, as well as teaching
violin students in his own studio.
One
day during a collage class at the college he felt something profound
happening. "My mind was crowded with thousands of images,"
he said. "Something went into gear, and my life changed."
Although he had a full-time job, a teaching practice, a freelance
music career and a family (he and his wife Moira, also a violinist,
have two children), he became engrossed in painting. Often he
painted in his tuxedo before playing in a concert.
Since
then, he has completed 70 paintings and 18 sculptures, receiving
reviews that compare his vibrant abstractions to the work of
Jackson Pollack and Arshile Gorky. One reviewer said his paintings
had "a rough-hewn beauty, with passages of breath-taking
lyricism juxtaposed with a sense of compressed inner violence."
Ed McCormack's review in the June, July, August 2003 issue of Gallery & Studio magazine of David's one-man show at Gallery@49 in New York City in the summer of 2003.
Fallen Angels 9/11, 2001-2002
Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 |
The Rhapsodic Abstractions of David
Tobey
Authentic
energy has been in short supply in recent painting. Postmodern
aesthetics tend to undervalue the gesture as a conduit of honest
passion. Painters like Jonathan Lasker have even gone so far
as to parody the velocity of action painting in terms as premeditated
and static as Roy Lichtenstein's hard-edged cartoon renderings
of abstract expressionist brush strokes.
In
an aesthetic climate so crippled by self-conscious strategies
and cunning ironies, it takes an artist as committed to intuition
and spontaneity as David Tobey obviously is to demonstrate that
raw immediacy can still thrill us in contemporary art.
Indeed,
the power and presence of Tobey's work is almost startling in
his recent solo exhibition of mixed media paintings and welded
steel sculptures.
What Tobey shows us, particularly in his paintings, is that
the lyrical impulse cannot be stifled or invalidated simply because
some among the critical establishment would prefer to push a
conceptual or political agenda; for it is a force as innate and
enduring as humankind itself. And he comes by his lyricism via
a unique confluence of formative experiences. The son of the
distinguished history painter and muralist Alton Tobey, he began
painting in his father's studio at an early age, and later earned
his Masters in Studio Art from the College of New Rochelle. But
it was equally obvious early on that he was musically gifted,
so he also graduated from Juiliard an accomplished violinist.
Today, David Tobey approaches painting as he approaches music
-- that most naturally abstract of all the arts: He rides the
rhythms in his canvases and reigns them in, much as a composer
controls the ebb and flow of a symphony as it is coaxed into
being. As with a piece of music, this involves a synthesis of
spontaneity and restraint, as he works and reworks the composition,
balancing its various elements until they coalesce in a dynamic
chromatic and formal fusion.
Through
such means, Tobey's compositions achieve the visual equivalent
of a truly symphonic sweep, with their flowing forms and vibrant
colors writhing muscularly, rising to a rhapsodic pitch. One
can compare such energetic pyrotechnics to those of Jackson Pollock,
an artist he greatly admires. Much to his credit, however, Tobey
does not ape the earlier painter's mannerisms. In fact, even
though his painting technique involves the pouring of paint as
well as manipulation of pigment with a brush, the biomorphic
sensuality of his forms comes closer to Ashile Gorky, while the
collage elements -- ranging from photographic images, to torn
sheet music, to bits of twisted wire, to shards of wood, and
other found objects -- that he affixes to some paintings are
more akin to the surreal automatism of Alfonso Ossorio.
Along
with his musical inspiration, Tobey assimilates a variety of
art historical precedents to forge a personal style in which
the overriding feature is his ability to harness energy and manipulate
form to his own ends. He cites a variety of diverse elements
-- Rubens' sensually "intertwining figures"; the "space
around Rembrandt's figures"; the "giant expressive
shapes" in Picasso's "Guernica," and even the
wild style graffiti that proliferated in the New York City subways
in the 1980's, when he was a student commuting back and forth
to Juilliard -- as influences on his work.
