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Experimentation -- the driving force

Prolific Tom Malone left a large body of art divided among painting, drawing, sculpture, jewelry, musical instruments and furniture. Much of his work is documented by slides and is largely dated, providing a chronology. Like many artists, he worked with several forms, materials and media at the same time.
His painting achieves authority the more abstract it becomes and the farther it distances itself from his commercial representational figural drawings. There is a lengthy series of these, mostly from the early 1980s. In that same decade, he also painted a number of non-objective canvasses, some with reference to nature and some with pure geometric or biomorphic form. Many are student works, but their variety shows Malone's versatility and willingness to experiment.
The abstract figures, painted in the late 1970s, are in an expressionist vein with swift visible brushwork and arbitrary color. We can see him working his way through James Ensor, Edvard Munch and American painter Milton Avery, but these canvasses have a fluidity and awkward grace that is Malone's own. The influences are present, but he begins to take a step beyond them. The appealing, frontal poses of a boy with blond hair, done in this style, could well be self-portraits of Malone.
Experimentation had to be a driving force in Malone's work. When he encountered the three-dimensional arts, particularly sculpture, he seems to have relaxed as an artist, perhaps having found his preferred medium. Concentrating on the motif of the fish, he systematically explored the form's possibilities without ever descending to the trite or the obvious. both stone and wood examples show his respect for material. Perhaps in the work of the master Brancusi, he saw how to select only those elements that suggest the essence of the fish. Ultimately, Malone learned to let the satisfying shapes carry his message. High-level craftsmanship with carefully treated surfaces characterizes these works. His sculpture is more confident in the round than in the relief form. the latter has some intriguing figural imagery that recalls Oceanic arts, but shows less attention to form and technique that the better realized pieces in the round.
The handsome casings for musical instruments and the functional tables that Malone designed demonstrate the identical respect for materials observable in his sculpture. He showed that the same attitude towards the object in the scrupulous restoring of his Volkswagens, another inherently satisfying sculptural form. Malone learned that teach material--wood, cloth, stone or metal--must be led to its fullest potential and not pushed beyond it. He knew when to draw the line and his sense of craftsmanship is satisfying to see.
A series of successful abstract landscape paintings of the early 1990s depict tall grasses bent by the wind. Their pleasing visual impact comes from Malone's rhythmic repetition of diagonal form and sensitive control of hues, mostly analogous choices. The viewer is further involved by an indistinct figure that appears to be watching from the dense reeds. By Malone's repeating the same subject in varying lights, the hues change and each canvas has a different visual effect. It is a direction he well could have intended to pursue, to his great advantage.
Tom Malone devoted his creative energy to many aspects of the visual arts, crafts and music, often simultaneously and interchangeably.

Philancy N. Holder, PHD
ASPU Emeritus Art Professor



Quintessence
for Tom Malone

I.

In their sleeping, fish
pretend blindness.

Fins and the fabric
of scales weave flakes
of darkness and slivers
of sunlight.

Fish dream they are
the wind shaping trees

II.

The crow and the hawk
share the dream
of feathers
trapped in stone.
Rain
married to eye and blood.

Hollow bones schooled 
in the weight of sod.

III.

The mole dreams 
he is a fish in the forests 
of kelp turning to crownfire.

The forsythia dreams 
her roots gather water 
from graves into the 
wind twisting her blossoms 
into sunlight

IV.

It is the wisdom of the prairie
to burn. The eggs of the robin 
have taken to the air
like flames. The winds wrap
the heat around the charred
stalks of grass. The soil
slips into the sleep
that remembers glaciers.

V.

These are dreams
of the artist.

MalcomGlass
APSU Emeritus professor of Languages & Literature