Thomas Koether

 

Artist's Statement

For me, the art of painting is a private expression of love of phenomena — a kind of cross-linking between my mind, my senses, and the world. It is an ascent in the creative process that, like any climb, is a series of consecutive footholds. For me, these footholds are the marks that inform the next act in the process. It begins with "automatic writing" — spontaneous gesture — no preparation, no pre-drawing, and no design. Instead, I let intuition initiate the work, throwing me into the universe of the painting. There are experiments in craft, thought, or subject and they are never redundant. Whether a reaction or a question, these experiments leave behind a footprint of the research.

Once begun, a dialogue develops between reason and emotion, passion and discipline. This dialogue and this living of the dichotomy in the act of painting are for me, both a sacrament and an obsession. My paintings are evolutionary. I work by addition and subtraction. I work from all four sides. I work with any and all implements — hands, fingers, spray, brush, and extraordinary, heavy impasto, but sometimes my work is thin and transparent. It is the process of engaging the tension between color, edge, line and space, which fills me with deep satisfaction unobtainable from any other source.

Tom Koether's work is represented in collections in Spain, France, Australia, The U.K., the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the U.S.A.

 

Thomas Koether

 

Born 1940, Detroit, Michigan, raised, Pelham, New York. My earlier work was of flowers, landscapes and caricatures of animals. By age 11, there were battle scenes. By 14, I was cloistered in my room after school designing and rendering cars and buildings from all angles. By age 16, I was a failure at school and a "compulsive" drawer and designer. Other children didn't interest me much, adults did. Music - classical and jazz, did. I met an artist who gave me some instruction in drawing and painting. He had me take pulverized charcoal on my thumb and draw the outline of a cast iron sewing machine base without looking at the paper. All the time he talked about the iron; it's nature, the physics of it, the charcoal, the lines, the nature of the lines, the relations of space and form - brilliant stuff. He showed me how to make gesso and make up my own panels to paint on. I did my first abstract painting with him.

 

By age 17, art and music absorbed me. I visited the Cloisters, the Frick, and the Metropolitan by day and the Five Spot, Blue Note, Village Vangard and Metrapole by Night (under age). In 1960 I was accepted to the school of the Art Institute of Chicago at age 20 (no high school certificate). I studied fine arts - painting with Ms. Kaufman - a student of Hans Hoffman. At night I studied classics at U. of Chicago, downtown branch. I started finally to get A's in academic courses and was attracted to philosophy and art history. I spent my time with professors and graduate students. I had a painting studio in Chicago and in my second year tended to spend more and more time away from art school to work at home or take classes at U. of Chicago at the Committee on Social Thought under Friedrich Heyak and Milton Friedman.  At night I worked at the Chicago Tribune's Production Department.

 

In 1963 I took a full time job as proof-reader/copy editor for a publishing company. I continued painting hard edge primary color canvases in my studio. In 1964 I was made East Coast Sales Manager for the company and sold from Boston to Washington and all N.Y.C. I moved to New York and started going to the Art Students League. I was also able to enroll in the Philosophy Department of N.Y.U. to major in aesthetics under Sydney Hook and William Barrett. I continued painting and drawing at the League.

 

In 1964 I worked for John Hightower at the New York State Council on the Arts as curator of the "Hudson River School" exhibition at the NY State Pavilion of the World's Fair.

 

In 1965 and '66 I worked with David Dawson as a fabricator building lucite fountains with internal lights. We installed one in the Guggenheim. I also worked part time indexing the Time-Life series on nature and geography. In the summers I was able to paint in Central Park. In 1966 I became interested in cinematography and made some short films. In June of 1966 I graduated with honors from N.Y.U. and was accepted to the N.Y.U. graduate school of Communications Arts in Cinematography under Haig Manoogian. A week before graduation, and one month before turning 27, the cut off age for conscription, I was drafted. This was a turning point. I refused the order to report and mounted a legal challenge to the draft. After an investigation by the FBI for a year and a half they finally rescinded the order of induction in January 1969. During this time I was a semi-fugitive and for that reason did not attend graduate school. Anyway, I really preferred painting to cinematography. It's more direct and personal. Through this time I was at the League nights and working as a motorcycle courier days and waiter at night. I was saving money to move to Europe. On April 1st I left for Europe with 2 motorcycle saddlebags full of oil paint. I motorcycled around Europe - Venice, Florence, Paris, etc. until settling in Ibiza, Spain in July 1969. I painted there for a year and a half. The color and clarity of light was awesome. The culture was brimming with color. There were lots of artists and a large expatriate colony of Americans. We listened to radio from Algiers and Tangiers - sinuous Byzantine music out of the starry Mediterranean sky. Myfinka (adobe farm house) had no glass windows and no electricity. Water was from a well thousands of years old. I played flute a lot. My paintings began by spontaneous mark making and then rendering. Color was the form - color was the light that made the space. I exhibited a one-man show in Sta. Eulalia in '69, '70 and '71.

 

In late fall of 1970 I moved to Paris to take a studio space at the American Center on Boulevard Raspail. It was a very serious working environment and I worked daily completing a large body of abstract paintings with a strong note of Spanish space and sky. I lived in my V.W. bus parked on the streets of Montparnasse. I spent evenings after the Center closed at the Cafe Select to stay warm before returning to my bus to sleep. I worked as an extra in French movies to earn money. In July of '71 I went to Italy and did a lot of drawing and watercolors. In Florence I met Italian art restorers and learned a lot about restoration from them. In October 1971 I participated in a group show at the American Center and sold several pieces - one to director Henry Pillsbury. In November I returned to Ibiza and took a 500 year-old Moorish house in Santa Eulalia and converted it with skylights to a studio. There were several shows in Ibiza and Santa Eulalia in 1973. Through my neighbor Clifford Irving I met Elmer De Moray - the famous forger. We talked about art restoration and fraud. He was tragic because he was a good artist in his own right. The work from Ibiza and Paris deals with attempts to delineate abstraction as a form with my own experience of my own abstractness - landscapes and still-lives of my own psychic and emotional space. This work has a post-psychedelic aspect.

 

In 1973 and '74 I made overland trips to Asia becoming interested in Buddhism and influenced by Islamic art and calligraphy. I felt a strong affinity for the arrhythmic movement in Asian music and how the architecture combined mathematics with the organic in a way that felt familiar to me. In 1974 I worked in N.Y.C. as an art restorer with Roger Ricco Associates. That year I had a one man show at Ajanta Gallery on East 9th St. I then married Naomi Epstein and she and her daughter and I traveled over land for 9 months to Australia. During the journey I did many notebooks of miniatures in gouache and watercolor.

 

In 1975 I lived and worked (welders laborer, dish washer, rigger) in Sydney, painting in a house in Kings Cross that had been a private mental hospital. My studio had been the electric shock room. There I did automatic gesture paintings. In 1976 I established an art conservation business and worked on the 5 major Australian collections of Oceanic art in Australia.

 

In 1977 I moved to the country to continue restoration and conservation and where I raised two more daughters. During this period I did a lot of three dimensional and environmental work - not so much easel painting. I lived on the farm and experienced the solitude of the "bush" for 10 years. This period of my late 30's and early 40's was devoted to fathering 3 daughters - having a restoration business and being on the land - i.e. bush fires - floods -stray stock - fences - not light bulb and/or apartment changes. I dealt a lot with the land -rocks - water - wood. It was very spiritual - metaphysical if you will. I did mixed media and collage throughout the late 70's and early 80's. Working with the land influenced my easel painting by grounding my figurative work in - not just landscape - but rocks and the space inside them.

 

My approach to painting has included abstract and representation and hard and soft edge painting throughout my career. I have used landscape and still life - studies of monoliths or aerial views of surf - as tools for extracting more out of abstraction. But it has always been abstract color saturated expressionist work than has dominated from the beginning.

 

My work deals with the problem of infigurating gesture and color to develop a syntax that allows deep space that goes beyond architecture (the Renaissance) or the materiality of the picture plane (materialism and modern abstraction) to a place-less space or what I call space-scape. The merging of physical and psychic space.

 

 

ONE PERSON SHOWS

 

2001   SRQ ON MAIN, Sarasota, Florida

1996   TAMPA ELECTRIC CO., TECO PLAZA, Tampa, July 1 - July 31, Marilyn Mars, Curator

1995   KOETHER - NEW OILS, Nations Bank Executive Headquarters, Sarasota, Florida

1993   MATRIX, Renegade Gallery, East Hampton, New York

1992   KOETHER, A NEW EDGE, Renegade Gallery, East Hampton, New York

1989   AUSTRALIAN ROCK AND WATER, Gochenhaur Gallery, Delray Beach, Florida

1987   TOM KOETHER, EXPATRIATE PAINTINGS, Curator: Nick Pearson, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, NY

1988   KOETHER, Recent work from New York, Cape Gallery, Byron Bay, N.S.W., Australia

1986   TOM KOETHER, RECENT PAINTINGS,  AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton NY

1985   PAINTINGS FROM EAST HAMPTON, Curators: Dane Dixon and Steve Loschen, Ashawagh Hall, NY

1983   KOETHER, Outback Australian Gallery, Curator: Gate Fynn, 382 W. Broadway, New York, NY

1974   AJANTA GALLERY, New York, New York

1973   St. Croix, Virgin Islands

1972   St. Croix, Virgin Islands

1971   Ars Bar, Ibiza, Spain

1970   Ars Bar, Ibiza, Spain

1969   Ars Bar, Ibiza, Spain

1969   KOETHER, DRAWINGS, Mahogany Inn, St. Croix, Virgin Islands

 

           SELECTED GROUP AND JURIED SHOWS

 

2002   TOM KOETHER, STEVE LOSCHEN RECENT PAINTINGS, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, NY

1996   Represented by KLABAL GALLERY, 363 12th Avenue South, Naples, Florida

1995   ART FOR LIFE, Juried Voice Auction, Jurors Marilyn Mars, Arts Impact, and Emily Kass,  Exec Director, Tampa Museum                      

1994   SARASOTA VISUAL ARTS CENTER, Autumn Annual, Juror Tiffani Szilage, St. Petersburg Center for the Arts, Exhibition Coordinator, St. Petersburg, Florida

1994   GREATER TAMPA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, Executive Exhibition, Juror Marilyn Mars, Arts Impact, Tampa, Florida

1994 KOETHER, ASHAWAGH '94, Loschen, Najdzionek, Strong/Cuevas, Grove, and Briscoe, East Hampton, NY

1992   SOUTH COBB ART ALLIANCE 7TH NATIONAL JURIED ART EXHIB., Juror: Larry Walker, Prof. of Art at Georgia-State University

1991   KOETHER, GOCHENOUR, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York

1990   KOETHER, LOSCHEN, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York

1990   FICKERA, KOETHER, LAWRENCE, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York

1989   FICKERA, KOETHER, LAWRENCE, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York

1989   M. CAIN SCULPTURE TOM KOETHER, STEVE LOSCHEN, PAINTINGS, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York

1989   DRAWING THE LINE, Curator: Kay Jeffed, Tweed River Regional Art Gallery, Murwilumbha, Australia

1989   BLOSSOMS, The Gallery at Bryant Library, Roslyn, New York

1988   HUNTINGTON TOWN ART LEAGUE ANNUAL, Huntington, New York

1988   BEYOND STATUS QUO, The Gallery at Bryant Library, Roslyn, New York

1988   WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE, The Gallery at Bryant Library, Roslyn, New York

1988   EGBERT, KOETHER, LOSCHEN, LAWRENCE, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York

1987   EGBERT, KOETHER, LOSCHEN, LAWRENCE, Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York

1986   PLASTO GALLERY, Mullumbimby, N.S.W., Australia

1986   SOUTHPORT ART SHOW, Southport, Queensland, Australia

1986   GOLD COAST CITY ART INVITATIONAL, Gold Coast City Art Prize, purchase, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia

1985   ST. ALBANS COLLEGE EXHIBITION, Honorable mention, Southport, Australia

1985   N.P.U. QUEENSLAND EXHIBITION, purchase price, Cape Gallery, Bryon Bay, N.S.W., Australia

1971   LE CENTER AMERICAN, Paris, France