For those with an appreciation for the patience of an artful observer, an artist with a passion for drawing from nature has an exhibition of his sketchbook drawings.
My interest is primarily in things seen: landscape, interiors, still life where, in the light of the imagination, the commonplace may be transformed into the extraordinary. The ever- present transforming principle moves me. I have no theories, no special techniques and no information to communicate. I try to achieve a brief glimpse of the implicit order that lies beneath what we perceive as reality.
- Tom Fairs
Tom Fair lived a life highly suspicious and with a complete lack of interest in showing his work. He turned down any suggestion to show his exquisite, complex pencil drawings in his lifetime. To many artists, who spent their careers working to get their work out of their studios and in front of appreciative eyes, it is inexplicable.
After his death, in 2007, Tom's sketchbooks of drawings were given to a friend, Bobbie, who appreciated and treasured them. And was determined to find a gallerist with the vision to recognize their importance.
Tom spent most of his career as a teacher, and when he retired in 1987, he devoted the last twenty years of his life to making his own art. KS ART gallery website
http://www.kerryschuss.com/cexrelease.html
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Each vividly realized scene is a fresh proposition, with its own felicitous arrangement of forms and its own set of exuberant notational marks. Fairs was an extraordinarily inventive draftsman, with a repertoire of wavering contour lines, staccato dashes and thick scribbles with which to conjure not only the city's compacted jumble of nature and culture, but the sounds of rustling leaves and far away traffic, the smells of coal smoke and grass, and even the colors of wet earth and overcast skies. Every encounter with the world generated a burst of individualized loops, squiggles, and shadings, which speak of an unselfconscious absorption in a place at the moment of its depiction and give the works a physical and emotional presence out of proportion to their scale."
