Upstate artist Tom Dimond looks back at his 50-plus-year art career in his upcoming exhibition, “Then/Now: A Survey of Work 1975-2025 by Artist Tom Dimond” May 6 through June 28 in the Solomon Gallery of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg.
An artist’s reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 15, as part of Spartanburg ArtWalk. The reception and exhibition viewing are free and open to the public. The pieces in the show will be offered for purchase with prices ranging from $150 to $3,600. Dimond will present a talk on his work at 6 p.m. in the gallery.
The exhibition will include acrylic paintings on canvas, watercolor paper and panel, silkscreen prints, and mixed media collages.
“These important works triggered the progression of my studio efforts from geometric hard-edged shaped canvases from the late 1970s to the present-day mixed media works that feature atmospheric textured surfaces that combine a mixture of watercolor, acrylic monoprints, laser printed imagery from comic books, various acrylic mediums and expressive linear elements,” Dimond says. “My work has been inspired by artists and movements from as far reaching as the Renaissance artist Paolo Ucello to contemporaries such as Frank Stella and Terence LaNoue. My more recent works have included imagery from comic artists such as Basil Wolverton, George Herriman, Max Fleischer and Jack Kirby.”
The exhibit visitors will be able to see “how an artist has developed a personal style of creating artwork over a period of 50+ years,” Dimond adds. “The development and progression of geometric forms on shaped canvasses through the expression of similar thematic ideas in various mediums has been consistently displayed over a period of five decades.”
Dimond says many times, he is inspired by “certain color relationships or textures observed in the natural environment while hiking in the forests and along the shorelines of the lakes of South Carolina or the marks of man in the environment may trigger or influence choices made during the creative process. I feel that my paintings represent a synthesis between certain aspects of the visual environment and the intellectual and emotional responses encountered in the creative process of painting itself.”
Newer pieces in the exhibit are from a series Dimond began about 15 years ago, “exploring various techniques and materials that I have been layering together and combining with a mixture of mediums. How this happens varies somewhat, but I can tell you that I combine free flowing gestural marks with watercolor, acrylic monoprints on Japanese papers, inkjet transfers of drawings, found objects, comic pages, watercolor washes, various acrylic mediums such as gloss medium, crackle paste, block out medium and gum Arabic. Not unlike the layering of advertisements and bulletins on billboards and urban walls, these works are meant to conceal and reveal images in a chance arrangement of color and shapes. The works themselves are metaphors for the process of memory and experience. As images are revealed and recognized, memories are triggered. The memories can vary from nostalgia to personal experiences.”
For the past five decades, Dimond says, he has been following “a creative trajectory that dances between minimal and maximal, playing a highly controlled geometric structure against the openness of intuition and chance.”
He continues: “My approach to painting is based on a need to establish a communication between my inner consciousness and the primary elements of art.”
Dimond retired in 2006 as an emeritus professor of art from Clemson University. He began his career at Clemson first as the director of Lee Gallery and then as professor of painting. He grew up in Massachusetts and received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He taught for a year at Winthrop University and then moved to New York City to work as art director for the National Lampoon Magazine. In 1970, he returned to South Carolina and taught in the Greenville County School District for two years and in 1973 began his career at Clemson University.
He has exhibited his work extensively in the Southeast and nationally in more than 200 competitive, invitational group and solo shows and has many awards to his credit. Recently he has had exhibits at Lander University, the University of South Carolina Aiken, the Governor’s School for the Arts in Greenville, the Upstairs Artspace in Tryon, Anderson Arts Center, the Brooks Center for the Performing Arts at Clemson University, Greenville Center for the Arts and ARTSpace Vincennes in Vincennes, Indiana.