Mark Tobey

Type:	American
Year:	1890 - 1976

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The Awakening Night - deluxe

Year: 1974
Etching XXIX/L
$1200.00

BUY

A painter of small abstract works with underlying religious themes as well as illustrator and muralist, Mark Tobey remains known primarily for his "white writing" paintings that give the impression of being expansive and much larger than they actually are. Tobey is sometimes categorized with the Abstract Expressionists, but in fact he was isolated spiritually and physically from its New York founders because of his immersion in Asian religion and major time spent in Europe and the Pacific Northwest.

His painting subjects included portrait and genre scenes, but after 1935, he developed his signature technique of "white writing", described by scholar Matthew Baigell as a "tangle of thin, continuous linear strokes" linked to Oriental calligraphy and created from his desire not to be bound to realistic form. "For him, the white lines symbolized light as a unifying idea which flows through the compartmental units of life." He avoided focal points in his paintings and let the lines blur so that the overall canvas became a symbol "of the unity of forms and movements in the universe rather than an example of traditional organization hierarchies in which dominant elements brought lesser ones into subordination." His paintings reflect substance but not solidity, a sense of "cosmic wholeness, suggesting matter, space with nonspace and indivdual stroke with the totality of the pictorial field".

Sources: AskArt.com