Tom Swimm

"Golden Reflections Wooden Boat Tied Up With Glowing Water Reflections

2021

"Portofino Memories," with rippling water reflections below the iconic Portofino harbor is a quintessential example of Tom Swimm's enhanced realism. This colorful oil painting is on ...

"River Reflections" with a blue stream flowing through green foliage is a quintessential example of Tom Swimm's enhanced realism. This colorful oil painting is on a box canvas painte...

"Colors Of Croatia" with rippling water reflections below a white fishing boat in a Croatian harbor is a quintessential example of Tom Swimm's enhanced realism. This colorful oil pai...

"Portofino Memories," with rippling water reflections below the iconic Portofino harbor is a quintessential example of Tom Swimm's enhanced realism. This colorful oil painting is on ...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas can easily frame the everyday. But my task is to trap the exceptional. Whether I am outside on site, or in the studio working from memory, painting is a personal, idiosyncratic process founded in obsession, and wonder. "My subjects are genuine locations. They all have names, and many have familiar and private associations. But my attraction to a particular street or building often comes, in part, from a suspicion that it is also, in a sense, nameless. I nurture enduring relationships with a terrain. But for me, a particular motif resonates when it seems eligible for a larger catalog of spatial forms. My paintings are less portraits of Brooklyn than pages in an expansive, borderless inventory of space and light. Their index-like titles and typically symmetrical or balanced compositions intend to hint at something of the monumental, appropriate to a classifying program. It is neither the landscape's planning nor its architecture which conjures the shapes I paint. Rather, it is its observation; it is how a place appears that forms a distinct typology. At street level, tight, box-like canyons of space offer motifs best captured in a square format, while aerial, panoramic views from a rooftop invite me to explode them in a wider canvas. When looking around to frame a wider view, the optical distortions of curvilinear perspective weave parallel lines into trajectories mirroring the dome of the sky. And on a clear day, the path of the sun traces analogous curves across it. Only turning achieves a panoramic view, and sky and street are themselves revealed as events. At times, glare, fog, rain and snow are also deliberately organizing factors in my choice of standpoint. I wait for and design with all of them. Land maps posit an objective viewpoint. But star maps...

Represented by George Billis Gallery, NYC & LA --Every painting begins with a place to stand. Sometimes I find one in seconds; sometimes the hunt goes on for many seasons. A canvas c...

Derek Buckner is represented by George Billis Gallery NYC and LA. Born in 1970, Derek Buckner lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, novelist Joanna Hershon, their twin sons and daughter. The artist graduated from LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, as well as Vassar College, The Art Students League of New York and received a B.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During his career, Buckner has discovered many different themes, but the one to which he has most often returned is the urban landscape. In these paintings, he allows the viewer a distinctive look into his everyday surroundings, often including factory rooftops, bridges and the rapidly changing Gowanus Canal...

Derek Buckner is represented by George Billis Gallery NYC and LA. Born in 1970, Derek Buckner lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife, novelist Joanna Hershon, their twin sons and daug...