Texture and Negative Space: Art by Jill Tompkins
Artist Jill Tompkins creates subdued pastel images that often have a focus on texture and negative space. Though her images are mostly figurative, the figure never seems to be the focus – rather, the viewer is drawn to the materiality of the paint, and the abstracted formal elements of each work.
It’s fascinating to be able to see the artist’s recent works contrasted against some of her older paintings, in her 2015, and 2014 painting galleries. Many of the works in these galleries are quite bright, and saturated, and sit in striking contrast to Jill’s more recent pieces.
Some of the works remind me of paintings by Robert Ryman – particularly some of Jill’s recent paintings where the artist’s hand is emphasized in the highly visible texture of each individual brush mark. As we saw in our previous feature of Jill’s work, the artist seeks to explore themes of nostalgia and longing in her works, ideas that are emphasized by the quiet, desaturated appearance of these works.
