Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one in a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.
SIDNEY — When Tom Perkinson, of Corrales, New Mexico, faces a blank canvas, he expects the canvas to tell him what to paint.
“I see myself as a painter of fiction. Everything I’ve ever painted is from my imagination,” he said by phone recently.
Technically, what he faces isn’t canvas, however. Perkinson usually paints in watercolor, pastel and colored pencil on paper. He begins with color washes and values — shades of color — and then, “I start looking for landscapes,” he said by phone recently.
He doesn’t work on location. He doesn’t use photos or sketched studies. So, his “looking for landscapes” is a not a process of driving around his southwestern region to find the perfect group of mountains and trees. It’s mining his imagination by looking deeply into the color washes to determine shapes and the particulars of what the painting will be.
“It’s kind of Rorschach,” he laughed, referring to the ink blot tests psychologists use.
“There’s always a hint of abstraction,” he added. “They’re landscapes, but they’re very loose. They could be (called) abstractions, too.”
He doesn’t know what any given painting will look like until it’s finished. And he knows a painting is done when it stops saying anything to him.
“The painting tells me what it wants to be,” he said. He begins two or three works and hangs them in his studio. Each morning — he starts his “work” day at 6 a.m. — he enters the studio and visits the paintings.
“(It will tell me there’s an) object down below that’s distracting and I didn’t see it the day before, so I take it out. Or it needs to be heavier over here, so I add a value,” he said. “When it doesn’t say anything, that’s when I sign it.”
He uses a maxim: “The value structure in a painting does all the work and color takes the credit.” That means Perkinson takes particular care with the value ranges in his artwork. But he also always keeps the viewer in mind. He decides his distance from the scene and uses shapes and color to attract a viewer from across the room.
“I try to get them closer, to draw them in. I have to get the viewer to travel (into the landscape). If I don’t walk around in there myself, behind that tree, around that rock, I can’t get them in. I have to be able to walk around visually in that landscape if I expect them to get in there. And I have to give them a payoff once they get in there. I never try to fool the viewer,” he said.
The mixed media works are vibrant. Perkinson used watercolor to a point and then applied pastel and colored pencil over the paint.
“The watercolor goes into the paper. Then with the pastel, the suface comes very alive,” he noted. Recently, he has started to add birds, animals and other figures to the landscapes. They appear because the painting asks him to include figures. He doesn’t plan them in advance.
“My style has a lot of spontaneity to it. I can’t labor over something. I can’t get bogged down,” he said.
The freedom in his work is especially attractive to his wife, Louise, who is a jewelry designer.
“The fact that it’s uncontrived and very honest appeals to me. He’ll take chances and create something that may be unbelieveable, but then you believe it because there it is,” she said. “Seeing a painting that brings you to tears — it’s a wonderful way to start your day.”
The met at the University of New Mexico. Perkinson earned his undergraduate degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and his master’s from the UNM. In the past, he has experimented with surrealism and mixed media sculpture. Louise helped him with technical design challenges in some ceramic work and sculptures. The piece he will create for the Airstream Fine Art Invitational may be all pastel.
“I’m constantly looking for new directions. I like to paint a sense of place. It always seemed more exciting to me and more rewarding to take something out of thin air and bring it to reality,” he said. “I never tell the whole story. I suggest and allude to things, but I don’t tell the whole story. It ruins the mystery.”
Perkinson likes mystery. On his website, tomperkinson.com, the artist wrote that he’s been influenced by T. C. Steele, John William Vawter and William Forsythe. But he’d choose a painting by George Inness if he could own any artwork.
“I have a lot of influence of him in my work,” Perkinson said. “He brought mystery and drama to landscape painting.”
Perkinson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, the University Art Museum in Albuquerque and the Eiteljorg Museum of Western Art in Indianapolis and private and public collections around the globe. Earlier this week, he delivered 40 paintings to the Manitou Gallery for a show that runs through May 20.
