Thomas Chimes: Early Works (1958-1965)

Thomas Chimes: Early Works (1958-1965), 2009
Text by Lisa Saltzman
56 pages, Hardcover
Published by Locks Art Publications
ISBN: 978-1-879173-41-5

"Developing, in these formative paintings, a visual style indebted to the palette and compositional structures of such modernist forefathers as Marsden Hartley and Henri Matisse and emboldened by the stenographic proto-abstractions of such New York School predecessors as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Chimes systematically put forth a series of paintings that pressed such experimentations with the limits of figuration into the realm of the theological, the philosophical and the historical. For if there was one subject that united these early canvases, at once figurative and abstract, landscape and still-life, it was the crucifixion, the martyrdom of Christ. From his 1958 and 1959 landscapes, Yellow with Cross and Untitled that coupled the loose, expressive facture of Vincent van Gogh and Nicolas de Stael with the disciplined geometry of Piet Mondrian to his pictographic paintings of the early to mid-1960s, culminating and concluding in the uncharacteristically monumental commissioned Mural of 1963-65, for the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, Chimes pursued the motif of the cross, and with that, the subject of the crucifixion, with an increasingly intensive focus." - Lisa Saltzman