Tom McGrath

This painting, the odd one out among the four presented here, is described by the artist as a "pedestrian landscape." A pastoral scene depicting a path traversing private property on an estate in rural Connecticut, it borrows from both the ordered, picturesque tradition of landscape painting and the looser, more riotous aspects of Impressionism. The format of the work is important, as it is in all of Tom McGrath's paintings of this period. The composition has been slightly compressed, like a feature film adapted for the small screen. This simple compositional device is a conscious attempt on the part of the artist to free the painting from the realms of the purely pictorial. In an instant, the canvas is no longer a simple window on the world, in the manner that landscapes through the history of art were most often intended to be, but rather a more acute examination of the constructed nature of perception.

Untitled

2004
oil on panel
142.2 x 243.8 cm

A car port – a particular sort of multi-level, trellised garage found in the southern United States – quivers like a mirage in the evening sky. Illuminated by a dramatic, celestial cloudbreak like a ship on the sea, the manmade structure anchors the composition and offsets the symmetry of the picture. The legibility of the its features, both natural and man-made, are disrupted through a series of carefully crafted optical ambiguities and collapsed perspectives. The artist seems to be posing a question: can today's landscape, an increasingly threatened space consumed by urban sprawl, still provide a romantic, transcendental experience?

Untitled (Car)

2004
oil on panel
142.2 x 244 cm

Painting from the democratic, almost childlike vantage point of a car passenger seat, the artist uses cool, neutral tones of beige, grey and brown to create an atmosphere of detached melancholy. Tom McGrath's driving landscapes are an investigation not so much of the landscape itself, but rather of our movement through it - and the effect that that movement can have on our environment, both perceptually and culturally. The road, a motif central to a great deal of American music, literature and art, is here employed as a psychological map of the passengers inside, as a metaphor of their running to or from something, or indeed of their not knowing where to go.

Untitled (Parking Lot)

2004
oil on panel
152.5 X 244 cm

This untitled painting is among the earliest of the artist's recent series of driving landscapes. Loosely based on collaged montages of multiple photographic images, they examine the way in which we experience the contemporary landscape. The painting's canvas surface becomes a car's windscreen, the view through which is distorted and warped by rain in the form of motttled, stained, sprayed, and scraped oil paint. This particular painting, which portrays a suburban car park, is the only one of the works to incorporate even a peripheral depiction of human figures. As such it serves to underline their irrelevance to McGrath's practice, in which the viewer himself becomes the figure, occupying the vantage point of a car.

Untitled

2005
oil on canvas
218.4 x 284.5 cm