Tom Baldwin, "Untitled", 1996

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Recently graduated from Pasadena’s legendary Art Center College of Design, Tom Baldwin created the series of inkjet prints Japanese Gardens … Read more Recently graduated from Pasadena’s legendary Art Center College of Design, Tom Baldwin created the series of inkjet prints Japanese Gardens in 1996 on his computer, using then-nascent graphics technology to "paint" his images on the computer screen. Baldwin embraced this technology and its accompanying printing process not just for the speed and ease of their use, but because the artist could achieve the absolute flatness that the principles of modernism preached but ultimately--because of the limitations of their tools--never reached. These colorful, semi-abstracted views of Japanese temple landscapes subtly, but radically redefine picture space. Baldwin shifts fore and backgrounds, giving equal weight to skies and hillsides. Endowing a lowly bush with a vibrant purple or orange might cause it to pop out of proportion, but ultimately lends balance and stability to the work itself, in short, returning the composition to its original, harmonious whole in keeping with the subject matter. these original prints employ a color scheme that seems more reminiscent of 1980s Japanese pop art beer advertisements than a standard representation of an elegant Japanese garden. Several of these ground-breaking works from 1996 will be installed in the gallery alongside contemporary reinterpretations of the series the artist conceived in response to the gallery’s request to exhibit the original work. The recent works break with the artist’s earlier, off-key palette and incorporate more earth tones, an artistic decision that probably owes less to the general trend towards green marketing and more to Baldwin’s lifelong commitment to organic farming and sustainable permacultures. Born on the island of Maui, Tom Baldwin lives and works on the Big Island of Hawaii. Japanese Gardens marks the artist’s first one-person exhibition in Paris and his first with the John Tevis gallery. See less