The first article here was a review by Ed McCormack of David Tobey's May 2003 one-man exhibition at Gallery@49 in New York City. It was featured in the June/July issue of Gallery & Studio magazine. This review also appeared in an article in the Larchmont Gazette. The New York Times article following this review appeared during David's exhibition "Structure of Energy 2004" at the Music Conservatory of Westchester in White Plains, NY in February and March of 2004.

David Tobey: "Fallen Angels 9/11" Acrylic on canvas, 2002.

The Rhapsodic Abstractions of David Tobey

          Authentic energy has been in short supply in recent painting. Postmodern aesthetics tend to undervalue the gesture as a conduit of honest passion. Painters like Jonathan Lasker have even gone so far as to parody the velocity of action painting in terms as premeditated and static as Roy Lichtenstein's hard-edged cartoon renderings of abstract expressionist brush strokes.

          In an aesthetic climate so crippled by self-conscious strategies and cunning ironies, it takes an artist as committed to intuition and spontaneity as David Tobey obviously is to demonstrate that raw immediacy can still thrill us in contemporary art.

          Indeed, the power and presence of Tobey's work is almost startling in his recent solo exhibition of mixed media paintings and welded steel sculptures, "The Structure of Energy," at Gallery@49, 322 West 49th Street.

          What Tobey shows us, particularly in his paintings, is that the lyrical impulse cannot be stifled or invalidated simply because some among the critical establishment would prefer to push a conceptual or political agenda; for it is a force as innate and enduring as humankind itself. And he comes by his lyricism via a unique confluence of formative experiences. The son of the distinguished history painter and muralist Alton Tobey, he began painting in his father's studio at an early age, and later earned his Masters in Studio Art from the College of New Rochelle. But it was equally obvious early on that he was musically gifted, so he also graduated from Juiliard an accomplished violinist. Today, David Tobey approaches painting as he approaches music -- that most naturally abstract of all the arts: He rides the rhythms in his canvases and reigns them in, much as a composer controls the ebb and flow of a symphony as it is coaxed into being. As with a piece of music, this involves a synthesis of spontaneity and restraint, as he works and reworks the composition, balancing its various elements until they coalesce in a dynamic chromatic and formal fusion.

          Through such means, Tobey's compositions achieve the visual equivalent of a truly symphonic sweep, with their flowing forms and vibrant colors writhing muscularly, rising to a rhapsodic pitch. One can compare such energetic pyrotechnics to those of Jackson Pollock, an artist he greatly admires. Much to his credit, however, Tobey does not ape the earlier painter's mannerisms. In fact, even though his painting technique involves the pouring of paint as well as manipulation of pigment with a brush, the biomorphic sensuality of his forms comes closer to Ashile Gorky, while the collage elements -- ranging from photographic images, to torn sheet music, to bits of twisted wire, to shards of wood, and other found objects -- that he affixes to some paintings are more akin to the surreal automatism of Alfonso Ossorio.

          Along with his musical inspiration, Tobey assimilates a variety of art historical precedents to forge a personal style in which the overriding feature is his ability to harness energy and manipulate form to his own ends. He cites a variety of diverse elements -- Rubens' sensually "intertwining figures"; the "space around Rembrandt's figures"; the "giant expressive shapes" in Picasso's "Guernica," and even the wild style graffiti that proliferated in the New York City subways in the 1980's, when he was a student commuting back and forth to Juilliard -- as influences on his work.

          In his welded steel sculptures, created with scrap metal, it is as though the often baroque shapes in his canvases have broken free and moved out to command three dimensional space. Indeed, technical considerations aside, his concerns are remarkably consistent in both mediums. Thus, in the pieces he creates in the workshop of a man who own a metalworking company and is, incidentally, one of his violin students, he says, "I work mainly with the concepts of balance, motion, and interacting and intersecting places in a three dimensional space... I work with these many varied shapes and start to feel and hear the inner sounds of rhythm, wind, and melody. I know a sculpture is done when this process of sound and motion makes a dimensional and fluid transition from one section to another in the sculpture."

          Granted, it is unusual to hear a visual artist speak of "sound" in relation to his work, but in Tobey's case it makes perfect sense, since the musicality in both his sculptures and his paintings is undeniable. His use of acrylics in his recent paintings facilitates the flow that makes his forms appear to be in a state of constant flux, for their characteristic liquidity and fast drying properties enable him to achieve an exhilirating sense of freedom and spontaneity. His uninhibited approach to color, in which he layers strokes, drips, splashes and slashes of strident reds, yellows, and blues, along with softer secondary hues, in linear skeins over the surface of his canvases contributes further to the intense kinetic energy of his compositions.

          Indeed, few painters today manage to generate as much sheer visceral excitement as David Tobey does in these new canvases, with their shapes and colors flowing expansively in configurations that often resemble stately energy constructs more than formal compositions, making the title of his present show seem especially apt. For Tobey's paintings seem informed by an innate, deeply intuitive sense of structure rather than by any conscious attempt to impose order or design. Yet they are possessed of a peculiar, rough-hewn beauty, with passages of breath-taking lyricism juxtaposed with a sense of compressed inner violence so pronounced that it gives the impression, at times, of threatening to explode the canvas off its stretchers.

          Aside from the aforementioned photographic fragments in some mixed media collage paintings and the boldly scrawled figurative references in paintings such as "Fallen Angels 9/11," specific images are infrequent in Tobey's work. Yet his forms are sensual and allusive after a manner that makes it possible to Rorschach an entire world of possible meanings into them. Indeed, the art of David Tobey fairly bursts with life, which makes it a welcome anomaly, as well as a vital alternative to the present surfeit of art about art.

©Ed McCormack
GALLERY&STUDIO
217 East 85th Street - PMB 228
New York, NY 10028
212.861.6814
galleryandstudio@mindspring.com

        David Tobey became a professional violinist almost by accident, when the only music school he applied to - Juilliard - accepted him. Visual art was his preferred calling, but his parents, thinking the violin would provide a better living, urged him to choose music.

        They spoke from ample experience. Mr. Tobey's father, Alton Tobey, is a muralist and painter of historical topics. His late mother, Rosalyn, was a concert pianist with a large private teaching studio in Larchmont, where David was raised and Alton still lives.

        Happily, the road not taken reappeared several years ago, when the younger Mr. Tobey, who lives in New Rochelle, became the director of music and art at the New Rochelle Middle School. A master's degree was a requirement for the job, so Mr. Tobey studied studio art at the College of New Rochelle, receiving his degree last year. All the while he continued his freelance music gigs, playing regularly with the Westchester Philharmonic, wedding bands and Broadway pit orchestras, as well as teaching violin students in his own studio.

        One day during a collage class at the college he felt something profound happening. "My mind was crowded with thousands of images," he said. "Something went into gear, and my life changed." Although he had a full-time job, a teaching practice, a freelance music career and a family (he and his wife Moira, also a violinist, have two children), he became engrossed in painting. Often he painted in his tuxedo before playing in a concert.

        Since then, he has completed 70 paintings and 18 sculptures, receiving reviews that compare his vibrant abstractions to the work of Jackson Pollack and Arshile Gorky. One reviewer said his paintings had "a rough-hewn beauty, with passages of breath-taking lyricism juxtaposed with a sense of compressed inner violence."

        Mr. Tobey's current show, "Structure of Energy 2004," which he says reflects his interest in physics, can be seen at the Music Conservatory of Westchester in White Plains through Friday. For more information contact Elizabeth Totten at (212) 744-3718 or email Tobey.