EXHIBIT: Depth of Feel - Paintings by Tom Delamater, resident artist at Patina Arts Centre / 324 Cleveland Ave. N.W., Canton, Ohio.

   Palimpsest (noun):  a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface / something such as a work of art that has many levels of meaning, types of style, etc. that build on each other.

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   On his website, Canton painter Tom Delamater tells us, “I would say I'm a self-taught artist, but that's not totally accurate. More like life-taught. Which is okay. My artistic expression began to come out later in life…”  In the process, he was attracted to Abstract Expressionism. I’m sure he was lured by what he calls “…its emphasis on spontaneous, personal expression over traditional techniques or subject matter.”

   Which is to say that on one level, the subject matter claimed and embraced by many abstract expressionist painters, such as the mid-20th Century trailblazer, Jackson Pollock ― and many other adherents to his aesthetic ― is the process of making the painting itself. It’s painting about. . .painting. That process ceased being a traditional exercise in imitation of natural reality, or illusionism, becoming instead a discrete performative action. Call it an improvised confluence of intent, intuition, and chance. The old tyranny of representational imagery was usurped in favor of articulating a uniquely more personal energy.

   I don’t mean to imply that Delamater’s brand of abstraction looks a lot like Jackson Pollock’s sublime messes of drips and poured splatters. Far from it. For starters, Delamater’s acrylic works in his current series, which he collectively calls Depth of Feel, are on a scale considerably smaller than Pollock’s commanding enormities. That said, there’s still a kinship between the two. You could consider them maybe second or third cousins in terms of how they distribute an “all-over” variety of gestures and marks that cover the painting surface. That distribution, however, appears comparatively more structured and rhythmic in Delamater’s paintings, imbuing many of them with a distinct sense of verticality.

   The scale of his works is such that they aren’t intimidating environments that overwhelm your physical field of vision so much as they invite quiet meditation and introspection. They’re not dizzy dance floors where paint has been flung at high velocity (à la Pollock). Rather, in all their accumulated layerings and gesticulations of the painter’s hand, Delamater’s intimate canvases strike me as ornamented symbolic writings of a kind. Palimpsest metaphors, if you will. These are flows of consciousness, states of mind or conditions of heart which over time emerged, were altered, and/or covered up, and/or redefined.

   They’re not just paintings about painting as a performative act. They’re also about you, the viewer, and your own performative action of looking with intent as well as intuition. So look closely, look long. Read between the lines. Feel the depth.

 

Visual artist, journalist and teacher Tom Wachunas received his BFA (1973) and MFA (1975) degrees from The Ohio State University. From 1977 through 1991 he resided in New York City, where he painted and exhibited extensively and curated shows for “alternative” galleries. During much of that time he was the assistant artistic director of the Diane Jacobowitz Dance Theatre, designing sets and composing sound scores. He has been an accomplished arts journalist since 1986, writing hundreds of reviews and features on the visual and performing arts for numerous regional and international publications. Locally, since 2001, he has had one-man shows at Millworks Gallery (Akron), the Canton Museum of Art, Kent State University Stark, Malone University, The Little Art Gallery (North Canton), Second April Galerie and Patina Arts Centre in downtown Canton. He is a regular exhibitor in many area group shows. He was curator of Gallery 6000 on the Kent State University at Stark campus from 2009 to 2018, where he was also an assistant professor teaching Art History and Art as a World Phenomenon from 2007 through 2024.

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