Bone Paintings - Tom Levy

The idea for Tom Levy’s oil-on-glass Bone Paintings came to Tom during a visit to an exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. In the work, Levy finds connection with the past and with mark makers of the distant past. The Madrid show covered the prehistoric period on the Iberian peninsula. Tom explains his experience and his works with these words:

“I’ve never been so entranced with a museum show. My mind and body fell backwards 1000s of years into the past. I landed, shocked, finding a cabinet full of cascading light onto a series of eight small scapula. Moving in for closer inspection I saw the most delicate yet somehow frantic carvings sketched onto the animal bones; silence surrounded me with the warmth of a thick fur blanket. I saw drawings of animals rendering the utmost sophistication, resembling deer. These images were created by intelligent beings, almost alien in my imagination. I had met my true masters, I felt eager to please and anxious to learn. The drawings were created without the contamination of culture, status, knowledge, money or success, the tiny drawings were the most important artworks I’d ever seen.

“These objects emphasized the vast and never ending specter of time. Here we were in the modern world as a minor blip in the age of humans. Each one of us adding a tiny subatomic speck to the story of our existence. Sketch book in hand, I started drawing the shapes of each bone. Thousands of years on from the moment a person sat in a cave, with only firelight, drawing into these bones, now here I was replicating them. This thought brought a better understanding of why I was drawing, and why they had been drawing: a connection between me and the ancient masters. Still here and still prominent in our lives is the primal practice of moving from world, to eye, brain, hand, pencil, surface and back again, again and again. This practice connects us through vast amounts of time and space offering salvation from the paradoxical anxieties of consciousness.

“We are similar in size and stature, although we inhabit a very different world from our prehistoric cousins. At the museum in Spain, I pulled out my camera phone and took pictures. I flew in a plane across a vast ocean back to the metropolis of New York city with 8.5 million other Homo sapiens and Photoshop-ed the images on my plastic electronic screen conjuring a manipulation which isn’t seen in nature. I took glass, cut a clean rectangle of 12 x 9 inches and used monochrome oil paint to produce a pseudo-scientific vision of a once ancient and sacred practice, object, and spirit.

“The paintings were only completed once I had digested them internally, spiritually, and intellectually. Eventually, I returned to Spain and explored the prehistoric caves. Being one step closer to the ancient sketches was as amazing as seeing them in the museum; occasionally I managed to escape the tour group and found moments of solitude with the cave art and the guts of the mountain. Words are futile to describe my feelings, but a mysterious nostalgia overwhelmed me. It was as if I had arrived home, thought a home I could not remember, one which produced a quiet discomfort within me, even a sadness. 

“Though I painted Neverlasting some time before the Bone  Paintings, time and space are not linear and neither is my work. I painted Neverlasting with no particular intention, only intuition. Producing Bone Paintings allowed me to see the surface of Neverlasting as a cave wall. Smooth, frozen liquid, alive, and breathing. It has many stories to tell, some of which are still visible in my own fingers or brush strokes. Could Neverlasting be the inevitable fade of time with its deep infinite abyss, despite the stories we leave for each other, which bind to our existence? Or Neverlasting is the sense of entering a deep dark cave, making a fire, which could be how I feel when painting. It offers nostalgia or the seeking of comfort through exploration and painted expression. Nothing else matters in the moment of creation. Perhaps an impossible harking back of a deeper human longing to return to the womb, the cave of mother earth where we travel for spiritual contemplation and essentially where we all come from.

Tom Levy has exhibited widely internationally. Tom spent six month at the Cyprus College of Art as Artist in Residence, several years after being a graduate fellowship student there. He received his BFA in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths University in London. In 2015, came to the New York Academy of Art where he received his MFA and won various academy awards. Currently, Tom is Artist in Residence at 1969 Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side, and was recently awarded a significant grant from the New York Community Trust. Tom has been featured in (T)here magazine as part of a residency in Miami.

For more information and for more Tom’s work follow these links:

www.tomlevy.me

Instagram: @tomlevy_art