Tom Cloney's art encompasses painting and photography, poetry, and music. Recent visual works resurrect 18th and 19th century roundhand styles in a modern idiom. From a poetic core they explore the limits of pointed pen technique including the use of modified steel nibs and quills, unusual and challenging inks and papers, and free painting and block print techniques using watercolor and gouache. The underlying poetry often explores the boundaries of identity, the point at which the individual dissolves into other.
"In my pointed pen work, the poetic rapture comes first and is an integral part of the process of visual creation. This is somewhat different from the usual case in calligraphy, in which an initial literary work is created separately and then given form according to a purely graphical method. It is also different from most practitioners of the European poetry tradition in that the act of writing is integral to the formation of the piece, rather than proceeding through a series of edits. My methods are closer to those of the Chinese and Japanese kanji poetic tradition in which all or most of the significant elements are created simultaneously at the moment of writing. I find this profoundly affects the mental state and rhythm of poetic creation. Even when I subsequently work the created material, for example to extend the writing into a larger piece than can be directly constructed with a pointed pen, the core material is produced via a trance state of full physical and meditative concentration. This makes each poem an exciting journey of mind and skill. When successful, the result is a work possessing an inner integrity with which others can find resonance."
The artist may be contacted at 3hourtour@viadoc.com
"In my pointed pen work, the poetic rapture comes first and is an integral part of the process of visual creation. This is somewhat different from the usual case in calligraphy, in which an initial literary work is created separately and then given form according to a purely graphical method. It is also different from most practitioners of the European poetry tradition in that the act of writing is integral to the formation of the piece, rather than proceeding through a series of edits. My methods are closer to those of the Chinese and Japanese kanji poetic tradition in which all or most of the significant elements are created simultaneously at the moment of writing. I find this profoundly affects the mental state and rhythm of poetic creation. Even when I subsequently work the created material, for example to extend the writing into a larger piece than can be directly constructed with a pointed pen, the core material is produced via a trance state of full physical and meditative concentration. This makes each poem an exciting journey of mind and skill. When successful, the result is a work possessing an inner integrity with which others can find resonance."
The artist may be contacted at 3hourtour@viadoc.com
