Last night we welcomed Tom Savage to Australia and launched his solo show Loves Notes From the West. 

MEDIA RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Brisbane, Australia, 3rd June 2017.

TWFINEART in Fortitude Valley presents LOVES NOTES FROM THE WEST featuring paintings by Californian artist Tom Savage in a stunning presentation open to the public from June 14 through to July 10, 2017.

Following great success in the United States, with his works included in many prestigious collections, including LACMA, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the Arizona State University Museum in Tempe this is Tom’s first solo show in the southern hemisphere, and he will be making his way from California for the opening week.

Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel reviewed Savage's solo exhibition at the Cirrus Gallery, describing the artist's works as "raw, incoherent, precarious and daring. At the same time, they're confident and desperate, riddled with deep doubts but also profoundly self-assured." 

Love Notes From The West will present two medium and four large format paintings that will shock, surprise and morph from meandering messiness to elegant magnificence. On superficial viewing, the canvases are confronting, almost violent, but after time, dissolve into a plethora of indeterminate possibilities. In the words of Dan Leach, one of Savage’s biggest collectors, “this guy teaches me to see.”

ABOUT Tom Savage

Tom Savage (born November 28, 1953) is a contemporary American painter based in California whose work appears in museum collections and has been exhibited in major cities throughout the United States. His abstract paintings and drawings take a historical cue from post-war European automatism and surrealism, and the influence those movements had on abstract expressionism.

The primal, unconscious and disharmonious nature of Savage's technique, which the artist himself has described as the antithesis of that of regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, has proven an interpretive challenge for critics.

National west coast contemporary art review Artweek, critic Peter Kosenko characterized Savage's paintings as "abstract and generally impressionistic, but they nonetheless resist placement within the traditions of abstract expressionism as codified by formalist criticism, for they display little of the angst-ridden struggle with paint or the preoccupation with the sublime that often characterize the strategies of the genre."

Critic David DiMichele of the Los Angeles Downtown News, noted Savage's use of unprimed canvas and "thinly applied traceries," wrote that the artist's style is "marked by a pronounced sense of restraint.... Emphatically abstract, his work seeks to preserve something of the initial excitement that occurs when an artist first puts brush to canvas."

Revisiting Savage's work at the exhibition Transcendental Meditations at the William Turner Gallery in Venice, California, Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel observed that the artist's "inarticulate markings, crudely painted and scrawled on raw canvas, share more with children's drawings than with any desire to leave this world behind."

Written by Tove Langridge