PAINTINGS 1961-1975 NOVEMBER 11th to DECEMBER 19th, 2015 525 WEST 26 STREET NEW YORK NY 10001 T 212 695 0164 F 212 695 0672 LORETTAHOWARD.COM
Thomas Downing, photograph by George DeVincent
Thomas Downing: Way of the Dot Phillip Romero, MD 2015 (Revised from 1979 original)
Installation view Thomas Downing at Loretta Howard Gallery 2015
Like a Zen Tea Master, Thomas Downing accepts painting as a lineage discipline—his colored dot paintings offer a place to slow down, to stop the mental and emotional distractions of everyday life. Downing’s radiant dot paintings operate simultaneously on levels of systemic complexity and elegant simplicity that are both calming and exhilarating.
In 1975, Thomas Downing was living on The Strand in Galveston, Texas. I was a budding medical student and artist infatuated with Ad Reinhardt, Marcel Duchamp, Buddhism, Asian culture, and eager to meet “real artists.” Another Galveston artist, introduced me to Tom. I recall sitting at Tom’s long table and gazing across at a massive dot painting behind him as we began what turned out to be a three hour conversation about art, culture, mind, and the relativity of perception—topics that we explored throughout our friendship until his untimely passing in Provincetown in 1985.
Downing saw himself in continuity with Barnett Newman. He told me of his visit to Annalee Newman after Barnett’s death and how she gave him some of Barnett’s brushes. Downing’s attitude toward art reverberates with Newman’s writing from “On Modern Art: Inquiry and Confirmation” (1944):
Installation view, left Fold Seven, 1969 right Ring One Saranac, 1971
“…modernism brought the artist back to first principles. It taught that art is an expression of thought, of important truths, not of a sentimental or artificial ‘beauty.’ It established the artist as a creator and a searcher rather than a copyist or maker of candy.”
Untitled (13163), 1961
Downing’s canvases resonate with the tradition of painting as a vehicle for personal and cultural reflection. The emotional intensity found in Abstract Expressionism is transformed into vibrant beauty charged with mystery, and hope. He cut through the trappings of emotionalism without denying the intense experience of emotions themselves. He was not reacting to history, but nourishing the vital human connection to life, truth, goodness and beauty that can be reified in painting.
Installation view, Ring Seventeen, 1969
Early in his career, in Washington, D.C., Downing was impressed with Kenneth Noland’s circle paintings. Taking the circle as inspiration for his own vision, he arrived at the dot. He said the dot “seemed right for me…the feeling of the actual painting of dots, of a gesture which was rhythmic and constantly oscillating seemed right. And the way a dot would isolate an instant of color and repeat it over a broad field gave the equivalent of an electric charge…the surface would pulse and come alive.” Reflecting on his fascination with the dot, Downing believed it may have begun while he served in the Army, 1951-54. During that time he worked with oscilloscopes, devices in which cathode ray dots pulse across gridded video screens to produce linear waves—the ultimate application being the television tube. Downing often mused, “Seurat invented the television!”
Installation view, right Ring Seventeen, left, Position 2-25-75, 1975
This exploration resulted in the consolidation of color, and space into a single form, the dot. By placing it on a field of unpainted canvas he made visible the unseen building blocks of the cosmos—particles of matter-energy vibrating in empty space. The ‘all-over’ dot patterns invite us to peek into the subatomic structure of Cubist and Abstract Expressionist fields. In 1979, Downing explained, “Where previously each circle was separate and distinct, now there is a merging which is so complete there is scarcely any distinction made at all. Instead of skipping and jumping there is a steady, precisely repetitious pattern of cresting waves. Altogether, in terms of composition and color, there is an intensity, a depth, which I don’t think I have touched before.”
Ring One Saranac, 1971
In choosing the dot as his signature vehicle for painting, Downing accessed a simple shape charged with symbolic meaning and global cultural energy—the dot could represent wholeness, a point on a line, a heavenly body or atomic particle, or the point of focus for mindfulness and contemplation. It can simultaneously represent phenomena in the external world and singular or cosmic consciousness.
In 1979, I began taking classes in Urasenke Chado (a school of Japanese tea ceremony). Japanese tea ceremony masters cultivate a practice of timelessness comprised of four principles: Harmony, Respect, Purity, and Tranquility. As the chaos of history unfolds, a Tea Master continues his tradition of preparing tea, offering it to others, and drinking it himself. It is a highly disciplined path of repetition, participation, reflection and exquisite attention to subtlety and endless variation. Downing’s way of painting parallels the Tea Master’s ‘Way of Tea’. A deep sense of tradition runs through Downing’s art. Tom made it clear that making paintings is a contemplative art—even a healing art—predating the mindfulness practices of yoga and Buddhism by twenty-five thousand years. Downing’s dot fields enter our body through the optic tract, and like the Tea Master's tea, can nourish, warm, soothe, and inspire us. Imbibing tea is an evanescent experience—drinking in a Downing painting through the eyes is instantaneous—and it can linger for minutes, hours, or years. The magic of his compositions can change one’s perception of time and space. Gaze long enough for them to imprint on the optic nerve and one can see them vibrate even on closing the eyes. The luminosity of Downing’s paintings passes beyond our visual cortex into the neural networks of emotion and memory, kindling the imagination, inspiring reflection. Downing’s paintings begin with the eye and emerge into the radiant beauty of mindfulness.
*Shositsu, Sen. “Philosophy of Chado” in The Urasenke Tradition of Tea (Urasenke Foundation 1971).
In a cave near the entrance to the Chauvet Cave paintings is a ‘Red Dot Panel’, apparently painted by one artist applying the pigment to his right hand and printing the Dots onto the cave wall—perhaps representing a mammoth—according to scientists, the dot panel does not appear to be random. Dot painting has been around for 40,000 years—perhaps a reflection on the human creative mind’s endless search for simplification of meaning.
Untitled, c. 1971-72
Tom Downing died in 1985, a year before the young Damien Hirst began his 25 year exploration of his ‘Spot’ paintings. Hirst’s Spot paintings, at first glance, are reminiscent of Thomas Downing’s Dot field paintings. In a private interview, 2003, at his opening for Romance in the Age of Uncertainty, I asked Hirst if he had ever seen Thomas Downing’s Dot Paintings, to which he replied, “No, I’ve never heard of him.” I can imagine that Tom would be delighted that someone else became inspired by the dot or in Hirst’s case the spot. Downing had a fantasy of an exhibition of endless paintings in a vast space that could reveal his explorations across time. He speculated, “Ideally, the exhibition would be shown in space—in a circular space station where you could also look at the earth as a Dot.” Downing did not see this vision realized, but Hirst, in 2012 at Gagosian Gallery, mounted a global exhibition, ‘The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011,’ fulfilling his own longstanding ambition to show the works together. Hirst’s diversity in art and his capacity to produce and exhibit art on a global, industrial scale is unsurpassed. His life-long preoccupation with death is explored in virtually everything he makes. His spot paintings, which are made by his assistants, are cadaver like. What they reveal is just how radiantly alive a Thomas Downing dot painting is.
Reel, 1961
Downing’s Dot paintings, (1959-1980s), explore the grid, the ring, the cluster, the mandala, the boundaries of dots, their direction, size, location, the seen and the unseen. Downing made it clear that the most important aim of his work is the activation of creativity in the reflective mind of the onlooker. Like Marcel Duchamp, Downing felt the art is not complete until the onlooker perceives it.
Installation view, right Untitled (13163), 1961, left Position 2-25-75, 1975
Words from Buddhism’s most sacred text, the Prajnaparamita Sutra (Heart Sutra) seem to describe the essence of Downing’s art: “…form does not differ from the emptiness, and the emptiness does not differ from the form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form; the same is true for feelings, perceptions, volitions, and consciousness…until we come to no realm of consciousness…there is no wisdom, and there is no attainment whatsoever. There is no obstruction…no fear, and (we) pass far beyond confused imagination.”
Fold Seven, 1969
Downing paid attention to everything—the seasons, weather, how light affected his paintings. During a summer visit with him in Provincetown, while he was staying at Hans Hofmann’s house, we walked through a garden of burgeoning flowers and I could see that these colors were finding their way into his new paintings, paintings that could fit seamlessly in a space station or a Zen monastery.
The vibrancy Downing created with his Dot Paintings continues to inspire new viewers that are fortunate enough to sit down and let their mind and body explore a spontaneous journey of excitement and contemplation. I had the honor of getting to know Tom Downing and when I first wrote this essay in 1979, Tom annotated it with the following note: “ I’m inspired by many different artists throughout the varied expanse of art history, some seemingly unrelated to my own work, some as far afield as Vermeer or Velazquez or the Tibetan Padmasambhava. There are very few artists who have survived the test of time whose work does not transmit something of value to the sensitive receptive eye. Ultimately it is not any given style but that mysterious, elusive element called content, which carries over from one generation to the next. It is something which the passage of time seems to enhance rather than diminish.�
Installation view, left Untitled (13163) right Reel, 1961