Tom Vega
Brooklyn, NY
Website: www.TomVega.com Neighborhood: Park Slope Media:Painting; Mixed Media;
ARTIST STATEMENT:
The communication of mood and feeling through the medium of color is of primary intention in my work. References to landscape, movement, the figure, and cultural context form the underlying messages—though veiled...and irrevocably transformed. ARTIST BIO: Born on the tropical island of Puerto Rico, my earliest memories were emotional, visual, and tactile. Surrounded by and engulfed in tropical light, color took on an identity that was indelible. For me, feelings had color. Music and words had color. Embraces had color. Food and its tastes had color. I moved to New York at the age of six, where I arrived from Puerto Rico during a blizzard—a painful experience. Raised in Little Italy listening to Mario Lanza from loudspeakers on the corner, I was a child prodigy on the violin. I taught junior high and high school, provided guidance counseling, worked for the Board of Education, and helped found and taught classes at El Museo del Barrio. My desire to strengthen children later inspired me to train as a psychotherapist and begin an exploration of interior landscapes. I painted throughout these years and bring this rich lifetime of experience to my works, which are intense, abstract, and intuitive and which call up visceral reactions—spiritual, sensual, elated, angry, or pained. Classically trained in fine art at the New York City High School for Music and Art and NYU, I am, at heart, an emotion-eliciting colorist, evoking a catharsis through color and landscapes of emotion and feeling. Large acrylic panels, some in horizontal diptych or triptych format, are earthy, rude, elegiac, strident, lovely, quiet, religious, and climactic by turn, and capture moments where the visual is inseparably physical and emotional. I live in color, express through color, and speak, control, resolve, and am magically at home in color. More...
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