Town Portraits: Art by Tom Menard
Tom Menard is a self-taught artist who works with a pointillism-inspired technique, creating intricate town portraits. Based in small-town Connecticut, Tom is inspired by the architecture and surroundings of New England villages.
I love the illustrative quality of Tom’s paintings – the incredible level of detail that the artist strives for seems both meticulous and playful, as if the artist is genuinely enjoying painting every small window on a building, and detailing each branch and leaf on a tree. The lightly textured painting technique that Tom employs lends each work a sort of three-dimensional appearance, sometimes making the works look like dioramas when seen at a glance.
The front page of Tom's website
Tom also dabbles in portraiture and abstraction, examples of which are available in his portfolio. In his abstract works, he tends toward a somewhat cubist, surrealist style that seems to reference works by artists such as Constantin Brancusi or Richard Pousette-Dart. Brightly colored and three-dimensional figures interact on the canvases while defying any straightforward visual definition.