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Photo Sue Harrison
Vicky Tomayko with “Exquisite Futures,” a monotype print that seems to track a poem her daughter wrote though neither had seen the other’s work. |
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“The World Loves Me,” monotype by Vicky Tomayko. |
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Tomayko’s other world steps closer
By Sue Harrison
Banner Staff
Vicky Tomayko has spent the last 10 years turning her realistic paintings of landscapes and animals into a shifting scenario where trees have eyes and reach out with their branches, where animals have given up being dogs and deer and become human-like but not human creatures. They all live in an imaginary world together making comment on the human condition and often on Tomayko’s own life.
The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St., will hold a show, “Vicky Tomayko: Exquisite Futures,” that opens from 8 to 10 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5, and continues through Oct. 19. Tomayko is also showing in the MFA faculty show at the Fine Arts Work Center. She is also represented locally at Schoolhouse Gallery.
“As I worked I became more and more aware that the landscape is alive and changeable,” she says of the transition in style. She says twice-daily walks with her dog gave her a new view of nature, and then serendipity stepped in.
“I had just mopped the kitchen floor and threw the mop water off the deck. A Cheerio stuck on the pine bark and looked like the tree had eyes. I began to mix my flora and fauna. I started to look for it and to invent it. The landscape began to take on a creature-like life. Roots were above the ground as if trees might move at any moment. The [formerly real] animals morphed and became less recognizable, more universal. People sometimes call them monsters but they are just creatures.”
Her earlier creature work featured odd entities with eyes poised on long stalks above a combination body-head. Even she doesn’t know what they’ll become.
“I try to stay open. I don’t know about it before I do it,” she says.
Tomayko used to paint with gouache, now she does one-of-a-kind monotypes. She explains the difference between monoprints and monotype.
“Monoprint is also one of a kind but something on the plate is reproducible so more than one print of the image could be made,” she says. “In monotype there is nothing on the plate when you begin, a blank canvas so to speak.”
She paints on the plate and runs it through a press to begin the print. Then she adds more ink and layers on her colors with successive passes over the print.
“I treat it like painting but it’s layering inks. Each color passes through the press and I try to make them very transparent. The white of the paper makes the colors luminous. I try to get it very brilliant.”
She talks about the transition of her creatures.
“In the older work the great big creatures took up all the space on the paper and even touched the edges. Not a lot of room around them,” she says.
They were more cartoonish in a way, less amorphous than today’s creatures. As the trees transitioned to flesh and blood the former animals became less animal until the entire world in her prints was anthropomorphized. She points to one creature and says it’s wearing a backpack. Backpacks crept in when her son, Arvid, left home for college where he studied experimental sound and geology. Like his mother, his world has fewer walls and more imagination. For his thesis he created an interactive exhibit using core samples assigned tones for each different part of deposition to create sound and music. One could select a core sample from a particular time and “hear” the world eons ago.
Her studio is in a house she and former husband Jim Peters built in the Truro woods near the so-called Hopper landscape. The house has unexpected nooks and crannies, wonderful explosive color combinations, faux paintings on the floor and doors that appear to lead nowhere. Like her paintings, it feels very much alive and one can almost sense its long, measured breaths.
Tomayko and Peters came to Provincetown in the early ’80s when Peters got a FAWC fellowship. She got one herself in 1985. They loved the area but rising costs sent them to upstate New York. Five years later they bought the Truro land at foreclosure and came back to build the house with their own hands. She lives there now with daughter Sylvia Tomayko-Peters and a quiveringly enthusiastic black dog.
She talks about the shifts in her most recent work that could be described as closer to the bone and sometimes darker.
“I started to add symbols,” she says. “Like roses, red for love, orange for passion, yellow for infidelity, that kind of thing. And skulls, they are signs of transformation, not death. I guess I’m always working out my own psyche.”
The new prints, with skulls floating among the leafless trees, roses appearing unexpectedly and creatures with a more human, more somber aspect, evoke deep emotion though not necessarily the sadness the various elements would seem to imply as in “The World Loves Me,” shown above. The creature hangs its head, dejected, or perhaps sad. The tree wraps its limbs about the creature, holding it close. A large red rose blooms love impossibly in the corner and a pink skull, softened by a dotted Swiss veil, hovers in the mid-ground. Altogether it seems to offer a very different message than might be received on first glance. It feels hopeful and positive — anything might come from it, even something very good.
Tomayko says the prints are glimpses into her interior life and a sense of her acceptance of change and oneness with the continuum of life.
“I just feel like a part of this big world. I’m not more important, just one creature.”
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Sep 4th, 2008