Color is the first thought before the brush hits the canvas. Blue is what soothes the soul, red adds spice, a wide swish begins the movement. Let the color take you… Go forward… Make a mark. Leave enough room for you to wonder. Let the color rush over you. Breathe.

Welcome to the beach! The beach has always inspired me to sing, dance, and paint. These paintings embody a playful spirit, and summarize the joy I experience during a beautiful day at the beach. “Silliness” is a prominent theme in these paintings. The beach can give you the freedom to act without thought, and these paintings reflect that freedom by mashing reds and pinks and oranges together the way you did in childhood. Back then you would say to yourself, “Man, that’s crazy, but it works!”. In the same way the colors of the boardwalk mix and meld into abstract images, the colors of my paintings combine to create an environmental whole.
I hope these paintings inspire you in the same way the beach inspires me. Enjoy, and have fun!

Lineage is a body of work based on two stained glass windows made by my late grandmother, Barbara Rosen. For these paintings, I am examining her unique use of color and shape through a lens of further abstraction. These works are painted in oil using a wet on dry technique to build nuance and depth into the intense palette inspired by glass.
I also created an accompanying series of works painted using the soak stain technique that I often use in my painting process. For these works, acrylic paint is the primary medium on raw (unprimed, unstretched) canvas, but I have integrated oil paint into them as well. This integration creates a unique pattern based on the repulsion and absorption of the two painting media. The palette for these soak stain works is based on my grandmother as well and her particular love of turquoise.

Ever since I was a little boy in Illinois I have always been “LOOKING WEST”. Cowboys , Indians, Will Rogers, Mark Twain, surfers, California Yosemite, Yellowstone and now the California painters Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Olivera are my sources of inspiration along with my wife and teacher the painter, Jacqueline Warren, who was born in San Diego.

Now here is a song that I wrote for Jackie’s birthday in November that explains all you need to know about my new paintings and the spirit and light of the West that is in them thanks to Jackie and the beaces and rivers and the light and the artists of California.

JACQUELINE

Jacqueline, my precious Jacqueline, the girl who taught me how to paint
Jacqueline, yes, Jackie is her name, the pretty girl who taught me how to paint
And make those colors dance around and play

And I am such a lucky man cuz she put a paintbrush in my hand
And showed me how to make those colors dance around on canvas
And she told me all about Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn
So all my painting have the light a California morning

And now I am a painted, a painter’s what I’m called
Cuz I can make those colors dance on canvases on walls
And I owe it all to Jacqueline, my California Girl
Who showed me how much fun it is to live in a crazy painter’s world

Jacqueline, my precious Jacqueline, the girl who taught me how to paint
Jacqueline, yes, Jackie is her name, the pretty girl who taught me how to paint
And make those colors dance around and play

This show is dedicated to Jackie and her patience and love.

In this collection, I continue my journey over the last five years to break myself from having to use a strict reference to create my paintings. It’s a range of works that explore the balance between using partial references and the lack thereof. With a handful of pieces, I manipulate borrowed photographs by reforming them, simplifying, and using them as loosely as I can. On the other end of the spectrum, this collection also includes a dozen of intuitive abstracts as a result of completely abandoning my reference and excluding it from my process completely. A new introduction to my portfolio, abstracts are the crowning challenge to let go of the plan and just paint.

"To me, art is about “magical moments”. That is, a magical moment for both the artist and the viewer. That moment happens “when a work of art works” and it keeps working for a long time. The more we look at a painting, the more we see: the more detail, the more magic, the more beauty, the more color, the more energy, the more love.

We wonder how did so much color come together in such a wonderful way so that the colors are all singing and dancing together at a party that never ends!

After twenty years of painting, I am still amazed by that “magical moment” when a painting comes together forever! It’s just that simple and true: when truth and beauty reign. When that magical moment appears on canvas."
- Tom Beale

By exploring animals personified, we are forced to confront nature, consider our relationship to it, and perhaps see things for what they are. Through collaboration and individual creation, these paintings are like mirrors for the world around us as both literal and metaphorical expressions. The aim of this body of work seeks to have fun with some contemporary explorations which we both share individually and collectively. From an ethereal domestic dog fight to a deer in the head lights; the unique “nature” we often find ourselves in has been reimagined for personal contemplation.

The outcome of the experimental collaborative paintings lends itself to new methods and processes for creating “together”. For example, one artist may initiate the piece conceptually, laying in the ground work in preparation for the other to come and carry it forwards…and or backwards if needed. Another method stems from the act of picking up “abandoned” pieces or surfaces that have been laying around for a long period of time; the resurrection of something old, giving it new life, new meaning, or end point for a particular painting. There is an unspoken rule in studio spaces the two have shared together over time. If it sits around too long, its free game to paint on! Mindful of the others’ plans of course, this is the real joy the two find in working together and sharing the process of painting and creating.

There is a space between shape and form. The negative space that builds itself from lines and light, keeping the shadow’s shape. It interests me most this negative space that fills and rounds out a central subject from a flat or distant background. This is my primary thought in approaching these works…

I’ve painted what I like, the dramatic and exciting, from inspiration found from simple shapes in flowers to intricate architectural scenes. All creating the negative areas that I find alluring.

So, when can negative be positive? In my paintings. Since I primarily seek to exploit color in vivid and unusual ways in my art, it took me a long time to realize that negative spaces can energize my color palette.

What are negative spaces? Those areas between and around objects. Negative space can be background. It can define objects and bring balance. But it can also become the object itself, shoved to the forefront by complementary surrounding colors.

White can create a negative space that gives structure and substance to a canvas. Other colors used in secondary roles can do the same. Negative space can be used to elevate starring roles in a story, which is in face what an abstract offering projects.

In much of my work for this show, I have used the color white more liberally than previously. I have been pleased to learn a new way of telling my stories.

One hundred years ago, written letters (a common practice at the time) were being delivered to Adams Street in Quincy, MA. I had the fortune of driving by the actual residence just as they were set out for the weekly trash in 1995. There were approximately six large boxes of diaries, stamps, sheet music, and photographs. I had just started thinking about mixed media and recognized what turned out to be a wealth of material for me to work from. Over the last twenty years I have used them in my artwork. Most everything here is from that rainy day. At the time I was wondering what was in the boxes. It was pounding rain on a prominent street. Originally I only took about half the boxes. Later at a girls weekend in Cape Cod we pulled the boxes from the back of my automobile. Quickly we thought of a friend who lived a few towns away and asked him to drive to the residence and retrieve what was left of the beautiful artifacts. I am still cutting and pasting the original documents into my artwork. Timing and a keen eye is everything. I still go to garage sales and look for items with a soul. The beauty of ink on the paper captures my imagination.

Don’t miss it: the greetings from man’s best friend, taking the first bite, or the longing in an empty bag.

The glow of neon, or the sunset at the edge of a cliff—life’s glitter is everywhere.

Like a good joke find it, enjoy it, and share it with all. It’s all a stroke in life’s painting.

The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “nothing is ours except time.” I share my own slipstream of time on my Missouri farm in this work. I have forever been awestruck by the indelible life force and beauty of the natural world. Whether I am looking at a sparkling reflection on the water’s surface, the veins of a translucent leaf in the sunlight, or the limbs of trees responding to the wind like dancers on the horizon. It is the sublimation of those threshold moments that I bring back to my studio.

The language I find in nature fuses with my own language to convey feeling and suggest thought. This focus highlights the mysticism, value and sanctity of the now threatened natural world. I link this awareness to becoming better stewards of the earth, and the realization that we are undeniably and inextricably connected. While there is a quiet and beautiful calm in the paintings, there also is a thread of the uncertain.

The paintings mirror nature, as both are like a temple. A place to enter, to feel, to contemplate.

Lil Olive is currently an MFA candidate in painting at Savannah College of Art and Design. She has participated in three solo shows at Obelisk Gallery in 2017, 2019 and 2021. Olive has also exhibited in two nationally juried shows. Ecoconsciousness, 2020, juror Eleanor Heartney, an online catalogue and billboard show, and Inspiration, a group show at Webster University in St. Louis, Mo. in 2018.

This collection of works were part of Rosie's Garden Show displayed like a dream in her sister's picturesque backyard. This collection draws from simple moments with family and other observations throughout her daily life.

I love finding fluid surprises, abrupt compromises and the lifting of boundaries in each painting or drawing. Sometimes it goes well and I have something. Occasionally I won’t save it as a piece, but let it be kept in mind as information for the next. I don’t have formulas or preconceptions, preferring to let the work show the way to resolution."

Endless rolling hills, grand vistas, and the ever changing landscape of the Midwest, the Ozark Mountains in particular, are the inspiration behind this selection of oil paintings. Seasonal changes and the splendor of nature are represented in these abstract "windows to the outside world." Vibrant and colorful, and of the Earth.