Bird lover and painter David Tomb on borders, coffee, and of course, birds

By Sona Avakian
April 8, 2010
AMSF Events Examiner

I love birds. I love everything about them. I love to hear them. I love to see them. I love that they can fly. I love the sound of the word bird. I love Charlie Parker. So when I read that fellow bird lover and painter David Tomb was having a show at Electric Works called Borderland Birds/Aves Fronterizas, I put in my request for an interview. Tomb’s exhibition will consist of drawings and installation and will focus on the birds Montezuma Quail, Aztec Thrush, Aplomado Falcon and the racoon-like coati—all creatures who make the United Sates Southwest and Mexico home–borderland creatures. First thing I wanted to know, of course, is why he loves birds.

“Ringed Kingfisher,� 2009, graphite, watercolor, gouache on paper, 44" x 30"

S.A. Why birds?

D.T. Well, birds are the bees’ knees! They can fly and they are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. What else do you want? I have a memory from childhood that is like a gothic vision. A group of turkey vultures that, every morning, would sun their outstretched wings in a gnarled snag of an oak tree. My mom tells me that I was mesmerized by this. I just think that birds are a beautiful expression of life. A couple of years ago, I was lucky to encounter the ethereal song of the brown-backed solitaire and see a resplendent quetzal flying through a cloud forest canopy with its tail shimmering and undulating. These are very rich aesthetic experiences for me. In terms of art, birds translate well as a decorative and metaphoric motif. Birds are inspiring.

S. A. What can we expect to hear and see at the Electric Works show?

D. T. The works on paper (approximately 14 pieces) in the exhibition will feature a number of birds that can be found, at least part of the year, near the border regions. Specifically the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas and the Sky Islands in Arizona. In addition, there will be one large-scale piece — 11 feet high by 9 feet wide — of a vignette mountain canyon scene with birds and critters. This piece will have a sound component that is triggered by a motion detector. The sounds will be mostly bird songs, a rushing creek, [that sort of thing]. There will also be a selection of desert plants to augment the pictures and sounds. I like this part because you can smell the soil, water, and plants. It adds a lot and helps transport the viewer into another realm.

S.A. Tell me about your grandfather, the painter Sydney Lemos. Any other artists in the family?

D. T. Well, I never got to meet Sydney Lemos, but as a kid I looked at his paintings in our house. Sydney was a very good California Impressionist landscape painter. The bulk of his career was between 1920 and 1944 when he died. He went to the San Francisco Art Institute and was friends with Pedro Lemos (no relation) and Maynard Dixon. Sydney’s parents Mabel and William were both artists in Santa Cruz. William was the big personality raconteur type and he was one of the first vendors at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. William’s sister, who lived in Chicago, was an artist as well. Their parents were both artists also. My mother thinks that one of their parents was an artist as well. OK, back to the future — my brother, Bruce, is an architect/artist and his son, Jason, just got accepted to art school in San Francisco. Whew!

S.A. Why does the U.S./Mexico border fence spell disaster for the environment?

D.T. I can give you two examples of problems that the border fence presents to earthbound creatures. There are natural animal corridors that animals such as the jaguar use to travel north and south through that region. This fence will stop that natural migration for the jaguar, which can result in either complete isolation of this small population of jaguar in the U.S. or the extirpation of this species in the U.S.

In Texas, at Sabal Palm Audubon Center near Brownsville, the construction of the fence will do the same to the ocelot and jaguarundi population. In addition, huge swaths of rich habitat will be clear-cut in all of the areas where the fence is built. This will prevent animal access to the Rio Grande River, which is crucial for their survival. Where the fences are built, there are large denuded areas of land — many creatures will not pass through these areas because they would be too vulnerable to predators — this completely alters the historic environmental landscape.

S.A. That’s ironic that it takes environmentalists and animal rights activists, not human rights activists, to call attention to the wall, which I know isn’t the total truth. Human rights activists have done their part, but still.

D.T. I’m not an expert on this topic but I believe there are plenty of human rights activists and environmentalists [both] that are voicing their concerns regarding this. Obviously, they have not persuaded the key people who can stop or reverse the construction. Here is another disturbing aspect of the fence: It is creepy to look at. This is no ethereal poetic running fence by Christo. It is certainly no meandering, hand hewn, charming, stonewall with ferns and moss tucked away. One glance at this would make anything, furry or otherwise, turn around, run and scream.

S.A. I agree the wall is creepy and it certainly doesn’t address the situation or do anything to lift up the standard of living in Mexico that leads people to risk their lives to come to the U.S. Seems like resources could be better utilized elsewhere.

D.T. There are people that complain about how money is misused or wastefully spent. This should be nearly at the top of the list. Sheesh. I buy coffee from Capulin Coffee, a coffee finca based in West Mexico. The owner once said to me that since his small company employs many of the people in the town/village no one in the town has an interest in getting into the U.S. This is a very small reminder that there are lots of ways one can help the situation.

S.A. Are there any superstitions about birds that you respect? What are some of your favorite bird folklores?

D.T. Of course, birds and culture have long been interwoven. I think it is difficult not to see birds through this prism. Owls are thought to be both wise and mysterious. If you have ever had an up close and personal connection with a great-horned owl you can see in its eyes that this is one shrewd beast. Owls seem to be imbued with an ancient presence that is indescribably powerful.

The way that artists have depicted birds and etched them into culture resonates with me more than a lot of superstitions. I remember as a kid seeing images of the Egyptian God Horus depicted as a falcon-headed man. I just gassed on the stylized look and thinking how cool it was that there was this God that was part falcon. My family went to Vancouver when I was a kid and I saw eagles that were carved into totems. That was so memorable. The Edward Curtis’s staged photos of chiefs with eagle feather headdresses are jaw-dropping pictures — it was obvious that these chiefs also knew that eagles were great! And I spent so much time looking at Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds. I loved the simple flat schematic profiles of birds. Much of the appeal of birds is looking at how others have seen them.

There is also the legend of the Tower of London where there are resident ravens and there is even a ravenmaster who takes care of them. The legend says that if the ravens ever leave the towers that the monarchy will fall. It is an amazing image to see the ravens strutting around the towers where traitors and witches were executed — they act like the own the joint. Those bad boys look formidable especially in this context. I find this legend very appealing and I don’t think you have to be in the goth or Dungeons and Dragons crowd to get the sense of wonder here.

S.A. The ravenmaster certainly has a lot of pressure on him. And there are so many bad superstitions about ravens, but the whole British monarchy rests on a few of them. Talk about superstitious.

D.T. Yes, ravenmaster must be a stressful job. I read that he had to make serious provisional plans to protect the birds from the avian influenza.

S.A. Final question: Is there any bird you haven’t seen that you’re chasing down?

D.T. There are so many spectacular birds, but I have started working on an art project to benefit the Philippine Eagle Foundation in Mindanao. The Philippine eagle is critically endangered mostly due to habitat loss/forest destruction but also because of hunting. This is a truly magnificent bird. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has a skin (stuffed) of one of the beauties that I got to study and draw. They’re huge chocolate brown birds with a massive bluish beak and a lion-like mane. I am trying to get a buddy from 7th grade to come along on a research trip to see this gnarly beast. Hey, no pressure, Pete!

The opening reception for Borderland Birds/Aves Fronterizas will be on Friday, April 16th, from 6 to 8 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The show will be up until May 29, 2010. Electric Works is located at 130 Eighth Street (cross street is Mission). David tells me that ordering coffee from from Capulin Coffee is very easy; he’s never had a problem. You just fill out this simple order form or email them. They’ll contact you for payment information. The coffee gets delivered by FedEx.

Much more information on birds can be found here. Interesting picture of the wall is here. More photos of the border wall, creepy and otherwise, can be found by clicking this. And here is some recent news on the wall. Looks like they are going high tech—less wall, more cameras, laptops and thermal-imaging devices.

by Richard Whittaker

“mountain trogon,� graphite, ink, colored pencil, gouache and water color wash, 42"x30" 2007-2008

I first became aware of artist David Tomb thanks to his portraits some years ago. It was impossible not to recognize something special in them, even beyond the artist’s formidable draftsmanship. In particular, the portraits of his favorite subject capture subtle states one recognizes immediately, most often subtle varieties of preoccupation with one or another unseen riddle. It’s that state of having one’s thoughts quietly elsewhere. Conveyed, too, is the strong sense that we, as viewers, look in on the subject caught unobserved and alone in his pondering. These drawings have a quality hard to pin down, perhaps of a gentle and compassionate impartiality.

Tomb’s portraits have gotten a fair amount of attention, especially here in the Bay Area, and so when I learned that he had turned his attention to a new subject, birds, I was curious. I wanted to know what was behind his new direction.

“Study: chestnut-sided shrike-vireo,� graphite, colored pencil, 13.5"x10" 2006-2007

A phone call led to a studio visit. It was the second or third time I’d met and talked with Tomb, and I was reminded once again just how enjoyable a visit with an artist in his or her studio can be.

What I remember is how Tomb explained that bird watching was one of his longstanding interests, something I can easily understand. Whenever a bird lands in the branches outside the window, aren’t one’s eyes attracted there immediately and linger with a kind of delight? It’s one of those pleasures that never gets old. And sometimes there’s a special treat like the yellow flash of a goldfinch or the charm of a tiny chickadee.

Tomb talked about the rekindling of a passion, and how this carried him to the El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. There, he saw first hand an amazing variety of birds he’d never seen before. All in all, it’s clear the artist has given himself over to an entirely new direction.

“Chiapas, resplendent quetzal,� graphite, ink, colored pencil, gouache and water color wash, 44"x33" 2006-2007

Listening to Tomb’s enthusiastic descriptions raised my own spirits, too. But what about the artworld? I wondered. Tomb’s drawings have the look of accomplished illustrations. Where was the offbeat stance, the conceptual conceit, or some other indication that the work was art?

We both had a rueful laugh over this–a taste of freedom! It seems Tomb wasn’t worrying about these questions. His drawings are born of enthusiasm in the old sense of the word, en theos.

Listening to him talking elatedly of his experiences, I suddenly wondered if any of it translated to a concern for issues of the environment. Of course, the answer was emphatically yes.

60% of the cloud forests of Mexico have disappeared, I learned. El Triunfo Biosphere Reserve preserve in Chiapas is one that is being preserved. Even the mythic quetzal can still be seen there, the bird venerated by the ancient Mayas and Aztecs as the God of the Air and associated, too, with the snake god Quetzalcoatl. They’re not easy to find, even there, but Tomb had seen one himself.

I forget exactly how he put it when we talked about this new work, but “I feel completely refreshed” is close enough.

By Dave Nordstrand, The Salinas Californian
November 22, 2006

“Buzz,� 44" x 30" mixed media on paper, 2001

He labels his paintings “Buzz� and “Fudge� and “Peaches.�

These aren’t still-life depictions, but David Tomb’s subjects don’t mind the names he affixes to their portraits. They’re also his friends. They drink coffee with Tomb, pronounced “Tom.� They dissect the day’s news and probe life’s meanings.

Then Tomb, a well-known San Francisco portraitist whose works are on display at the Hartnell College Visual Arts Building gallery through Dec. 20 in “the Figure Unstudied,� reaches for his brushes.

Quickly, he paints his friends.

“They must be good friends, too, because even when they see the results of my work, they come back,� Tomb said.

“Fudge,� 44" x 30.25" mixed media on paper, 2001

“One sitting per picture. I maintain a caffeinated conversation so we’re both engaged in the process. I socialize and work at the same time.�

Tomb works in his studio, which is part of what once was a 1950s police precinct station, a building complete with holding tank, in the Mission District.

“Brick and concrete in the Dragnet modernist style,� Tomb said of the structure.

Since his friends are often restless souls and not professional artist models, Tomb limits their sitting time. Usually, it’s one three-hour session with two hours for the head and face and one for the body.

Creating quickly helps capture a spontaneity of moment and an authenticity of character, qualities of a portrait that tend to slip away with repeated sittings, he said.

The exhibition at Hartnell shows drawings, mixed-media collages and paintings.

“On the drawings, Tom works on poses lasting no longer than six or eight minutes,� said Gary Smith, gallery director.

One reason Smith brought Tomb’s works to Hartnell was to show students how a master artist uses “line and gesture to capture the essence of the human figure.�

Tomb grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a boy, he became fascinated by art, which also ran in his blood.

His great-grandfather, for example, ran a booth along the Santa Cruz Boardwalk early in the 20th century. Great-grandfather sold souvenir landscapes that he painted on redwood bark.

“He was a painter and raconteur, and I still have a couple of his works,� Tomb said.

Tomb’s mother studied to be an illustrator. His brother, Bruce, is an architect who also enjoys doing art.

After a subject has stood and stretched and left his studio, Tomb may develop the portrait further. To do so, he’ll turn to notes he took during the session.

“Spidery fingers, knobby knees, double chin, major schnozz, buzz cut …â€�

“It’s all good,� Tomb said. “Faces and portraits. It’s what turns my motor.�

by Kenneth Baker, The San Francisco Chronicle, 2005

“Whiskered Mencher,� 2005, San Francisco, CA

Tomb at Buncheon: Viewers will have no trouble accepting the portraits of Bay Area painter David Tomb as drawings.

They hang unframed at Bucheon, some with collage elements that spill over a page’s rectangle, some with a second page attached to accomodate an observation or finesse a formal tight spot. Tomb does the opposite of allowing himself to “follow blindly� the images that form under his hand.

Each drawing plainly notates his view of a believably individual sitter. But representation continually competes for Tomb’s attention with his responses to what he and his materials have done. The process registers as forcefully as the subject, which may help explain Tomb’s affinity for eccentric-looking sitters.

Their cobbled-together quality gives Tomb’s portraits a credibility lacking in most contemporary hand-made images of people. They center likeness not on appearance but on fabrication and the sense of every self as an unrepeatable patchwork.

“Hibernation�1987 ink, charcoal, graphite 24.5" x 22" by David Tomb

The Dorothy Weiss Gallery, 256 Sutter Street, is known for showing ceramics primarily. Now Weiss has gotten interested in showing two-dimensional work, making a strong beginning with a show of drawings by David Tomb.

Tomb, who recently moved to New York from San Francisco, shows charcoal figure drawings in which the lines behave as if they start out being descriptive but abruptly become ends in themselves, as if Tomb’s attention kept reverting compulsively from model to marks.

Tomb intensifies into a struggle the normal draftsmanly transit of attention between subject and process, and process wins out. And that struggle, not the model, becomes the real subject of his drawings, which are getting increasingly stark.

The San Francisco Chronicle, 1995

by Harry Roche, SF Weekly, November 15, 2000

“Steven,� 2000, Oil on canvas, 80" x 60", by David Tomb

One of the Bay Area’s best painters, David Tomb defiantly traffics in an old-fangled and unhip genre: portraiture. “David Tomb: Diorama� at the Hackett-Freedman Gallery brings together four sensual, life-sized portraits of people near and dear to him. As these unfold into intimate psychological studies, Tomb emerges as a painter’s painter — that is, one who revels in the pleasures of paint itself. Masterfully blending abstract and representational elements, his rich surfaces are slathered with frostinglike furrows while the subjects’ meaty faces and flesh rise from voluptuous color shards that reflect the influences of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. Susan depicts a bird’s-eye view of the artist’s raven-haired wife, wearily clutching a champagne glass, against a buttery yellow backdrop. The thin-skeined Steven, an unusually impasto-leeched full-length portrait of performance artist Steven Raspa, is awash in eye-popping electric acid reds and blues. It jumps off the wall ‘atcha like a psychedelic Day-Glo dandy (replete with peacock and bubble-blower).

David Tomb: Ogle: Portrait Drawings Hackett-Freedman Gallery San Francisco, CA

by Kenneth Baker, The San Francisco Chronicle, August 2003

J.J. 2003, mixed media, 44 x 30, by David Tomb

The graphic energy of David Tomb’s best portrait drawings at Hackett-Freedman blows away our expectation of psychological depth. Tomb uses his subjects’ appearance to get his hand going, not as inroads to their character. Visitors leave the show knowing no more than when they arrived about the people Tomb portrays, likenesses aside.

Collector Robert Shimshak’s face resembles Tomb’s image of it to a striking degree, yet it reads like an excuse for the lather of charcoal and gouache marks that Tomb uncorks to convey Shimshak’s legs-crossed posture and patterned shirt.

Tomb’s portraits seem up-to-the-minute not because they show a knowledge of modern portraitists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Alice Neel, though they do, but because Tomb looks harder at, and believes more in, the way fabric creases report the clothed body than at the way faces clothe identity.

Notice how a few deft brush strokes of black over white render the folds in the black shirt of “J.J.� (2003). They report a fleshy torso to match the subject’s face, but also evoke a sort of cladding, like an armadillo shell, suggestive of some unobvious hardness.

Feeling Groovy, 2003, charcoal & gouache, 44 x 30, by David Tomb

In “Feeling Groovy� (2003) — the most impressive thing here — the technique that describes the spaced-out, unnamed sitter conveys his relaxation more immediately than his slouching pose.

In his treatment of the man’s plaid shirt, Tomb flutters a little manifesto celebrating the athletics of hand and eye, as against the supposed intellectual rigor for which the modernist grid stands.

The exhibited portraits’ unevenness can make a viewer wonder whether Tomb yet inhabits comfortably the uncompromising artistic posture he has earned.

No matter, he has let his hand go and it will take him there.

S .F. painter’s ultra-vivid portraits convey character

by Jesse Hamlin, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer, November 1, 2000

Sometimes David Tomb is a little startled when he walks into his studio and encounters his life-size portraits of friends. “It really feels like the person is there,� says Tomb, a noted San Francisco painter whose boldly colored pictures draw on the long tradition of portraiture but have an edgy contemporary buzz of their own.

Tomb hopes that visitors walking into the Hackett- Freedman Gallery will experience that same “split second of suspended disbelief,� when the people in the paintings appear alive and present. He likens the sensation to confronting a diorama in a natural history museum, when what’s real and what’s not momentarily blur. That’s why Tomb calls this show “Diorama.� It comprises just four big portraits, one of his wife and the others of close friends well known in Bay Area music and art circles: musician Cory McAbee of the Billy Naylor Show, artist Steven Briscoe and performance artist Steven Raspa. They go on display in the small back gallery at Hackett-Freedman tomorrow night, the first Thursday of the month, when downtown San Francisco galleries stay open late for show-hopping crowds.

These paintings, whose thickly impastoed faces and hands suggest the influence of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, are more formal and controlled than the wildly gestural figurative drawings and paintings for which Tomb is best known.

“I think these are a little more refined,� says Tomb, 39, a Bay Area native who studied at Long Beach State and whose unorthodox portraits were the subject of an exhibition earlier this year at the Fresno Art Museum. The drawings “tended to be a lot more gestural and layered, and a little more improvised. There was a lot of exploration and invention, and I feel a lot of that is still happening in these, but it’s a little more subtle.

“For me it’s important to have a balance of refinement and aspects of the picture that are little more rough and tumble or less developed. Over the last few years I’ve been more focused on color, using vibrant color, sometimes even aggressively, as a really strong component of the picture.�

These pictures rock with blazing reds and greens, blue and yellows, befitting the flamboyance of some of these showbiz folk. Performance artist Raspa, known for his “Burning Man� installations, stands in a purple blazer and fire-red shirt and trousers. That’s what he wore while posing for the picture during numerous sessions. But his eyes weren’t closed, as they are in the painting, nor was there a peacock at his feet, or that great swath of blue behind him.

While Tomb depicts his subjects with a certain verisimilitude, he reworks the image for as long as two years until the portrait emerges. He places the figures in fictional settings whose contrasting forms, colors and textures create tension and say something about the subject. The painting is not just a portrait of the sitter or of himself, but “that dynamic between us,� Tomb says, “the connection between the two, the friendship or the energy, for lack of a better term, or communion. I guess it’s a document of what happens in between.�

After the sitter leaves, Tomb starts to invent, adding and taking away elements that bring out the strong presence of character that “I like to think all my friends have,� he says with a laugh. He finds their particular characters “elusive and mysterious. It’s something I want to share with other people.�

He repainted Raspa’s eyes shut because he wanted to portray his friend’s dreamlike quality. The peacock just came to him and felt right. “Steven has a very intense and vibrant spirit. The peacock is a very exotic bird, and there’s also something slightly menacing about it. It’s beautiful and menacing. Steven is not really a menacing person, but there is a bit of an edge to his personality. There is something just slightly menacing about his face, but balanced with a kind of wonderment. It’s those tensions that to me are really interesting.�

Tomb’s portrait of Briscoe, with his neon-green blazer and red electric guitar, is loosely based on Manet’s “Luncheon in the Studio,� except here the bountiful meal is replaced with a huge bottle of Bass ale.

Tomb portrayed his wife, Susan, sitting on a settee in a compressed living room space where objects have been tilted up to the picture plane in a way that makes it seem “vertiginous and flat at the same time,� Tomb says. Holding an empty champagne glass, she has a melancholy expression that her husband attributes half-jokingly to “sitter fatigue.� Tomb thinks the picture captures Susan’s introspective nature. “My wife is a lot more beautiful than how the picture turned out,� says the artist. “But there’s something about how it came out that is very much Susan.�

Portrait painting is hardly hip in the contemporary art world. But Tomb, whose grandfather was the California Impressionist painter Sidney Lemos, likes being part of a tradition to which he feels he’s adding something new and subtle of his own.

“Some people find it constricting and confining. But I happen to find it very rewarding. Most of the great artists I’ve been inspired by have done portraits — Picasso, Modigliani, Caravaggio, Velazquez, de Kooning. For me it seems like such a natural thing. People’s faces are very compelling and interesting.â€�

by Harry Roche

“Buzz� by David Tomb

Never one to hop aboard crowded bandwagons or morph into some trendy chameleon slavishly mirroring the latest art world fad, David Tomb doggedly follows his own path. As legions of lesser artists scurry to chart brave new worlds in cyberspace, the digital world, and other high-tech media at the outset of the new millennium, the San Francisco artist quietly forges ahead within that traditional yet nowadays passe genre — portraiture. Tomb’s aesthetic universe has revolved around the solitary human figure for the better part of two decades now. These days, the 40 year-old is quite possibly the finest practitioner of what might be termed “figurative expressionismâ€� in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Although better known as a painter, the dozen or so drawings that comprise “Twitch� reveal his considerable gifts as a draftsman. Whereas a colorful canvas might obscure a painting’s linear and structural underpinnings, the whiplash charcoal gestures that simultaneously define a body/object while existing independently as abstract marks come to the forefront in these barer-boned drawings. Like all great artists, Tomb has mined art history’s rich past and assimilated a personal pantheon of favored masters: Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Alice Neel, and Willem de Kooning (as well as Pablo Picasso, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Edouard Manet et al.). Yet even as he lays bare and infuses these disparate influences into his work, Tomb manages to meld this ecumenical potpourri into something distinctly his own.

But Tomb parts company from many of his predecessors in that he rarely accepts commissions, instead preferring to paint or sketch people with whom he has a personal relationship. Such Intimacy, Tomb feels, helps spark a more dynamic collaborative interchange between artist and model. In their taut balance of line and color, these fluid, large-scale (44â€�x30â€�) works on paper — charcoal and gouache, ink, watercolor…) can also be thought of as ‘painted drawings’ that hover– or twitch– half-way between painting and drawing, representation and abstraction. Moreover, his modus operandi is to continue working and subject a piece to subtle or radical metamorphoses long after the sitter has gone. It seems drawings and models alike are works-in-progress.

The Neel-esque Buzz (2001) conveys a compelling blend of angst and ennui through body language that at once conceals and reveals the sitter’s state of mind. With tightly-pursed lips, crossed legs, and hands clasped over knees, twenty-something Amy sits perched demurely on the edge of her seat in a manner that simultaneously anchors and de-stabilizes the composition. If one might never guess this seemingly introverted figure is the girlfriend of a flamboyant musician-performance artist, successful portraits function as personal anxiety meters or Richter scales. Our placid model’s protective ‘closed’ posture stands in marked contrast to, say, Picasso’s triumphant splayed acrobats of the Rose Period. Her sweater ripples with thin herring-bone rivulets of emotional energy that echo the flat sky-blue wall behind her and belie the feigned calm frozen upon her mask-like face. The Sphinxian remoteness of Amy’s three-quarter profile cum non-confrontational gaze is partially counterbalanced by a large Egyptian frontal eye bequeathed from Picasso’s “demoiselles� and the way Tomb has her practically tumbling into our laps via a vertically upended brown, diamond-patterned floor plane.

Here and elsewhere, Tomb shows himself to be a master of playing off oppositions that set in motion a lively formal-psychological back-and-forth, push-and-pull, give-and-take (e.g. Amy’s face brings to mind an Iberian stone sculpture whose features possess a Bacon-like Silly Putty plasticity). Allowing the sheet of paper’s white void to bleed through and become incorporated around and even within a lone figure not only suggests that old time existentialism, it also generates a dynamic tension between the flat picture plane and three-dimensional figure. In Suspended Disbelief (2001), Tomb tweaks Freud’s unflinching realism even as it harks back to Ingres’ famous portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin (1832). Here, we encounter longtime friend and frequent model Richard, a veritable man-mountain or not-so-jolly Santa Claus whose ‘flat’ jelly-belly is defined largely through negative space. Whereas Ingres’ irascible “Buddha of the bourgeoisie� appeared almost clamped within his wooden chair, Tomb’s rotund blue-eyed Buddha is imprisoned inside his own body, his tight-belt a restrictive truss. The ash gray features, dark cloud literally hovering over head, and patches of blue dispersed over his body subliminally coalesce to suggest a saturnine temperament.

As the abstract skeletons of line and color takes on lives of their own, Tomb’s colorful models spark our imaginations while the drawings themselves hold clues to their real stories. Tomb is that rare artist’ artist capable of connecting with a wider audience than is often the case with more hermetic contemporary art. Assuming that painting and portraiture continue to roll with the punches and survive the fickleness of fashion, one day Tomb’s engaging portrait gallery might just be a familiar presence in museums across the land.

* This essay was originally published in 2001 as a brochure for a David Tomb solo drawing exhibition on the East Coast.

Harry Roche is a contributing editor to Artweek, associate editor of Tea Party Magazine, and has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, East Bay Express, and Sculpture Magazine among other publications.