Tom Henry III Takes Chances With Colorful Monochromes

FACES

“If you want to survive as an artist, you’ve always got to do things bigger and better than you did before. But you also have to take chances,” says artist Tom Henry III, who is showing at Matthew Scott Fine Art through Jan. 12.

Whereas his previous works used commercially recognized symbols, like the names of heavy-metal rock bands or bank and car logos, and bright fluorescent colors “that made them stand out from everything else,” Henry has chosen a slightly more subtle route this time with a show of 10 vividly colored monochrome paintings.

“This work is not so accessible; I’ve limited my audience with these paintings because they’re not so blatantly Pop Culture references,” says Henry, 30. “It’s more my giving people what I want to give them than what they want to get.

“These are really serious paintings to me,” he continued. “They’re more about the paint, more about the academic. This is the first time I’ve concerned myself with a real painterly surface.”

But despite the serious talk, Henry doesn’t hide the fact that he didn’t apply any of the paint on the monochromes himself. Instead, he prepared the canvas with a primer, creating brush strokes and different thicknesses, then took them to an auto body shop where they were sprayed with custom car colors, such as magenta, gold, canary yellow and deep turquoise.

“When I was at CalArts, John Baldessari, who was my mentor, once asked me if I could imagine ever having somebody else paint my paintings for me,” Henry remembers. “I wasn’t so jaded then, and I thought nobody could help me with my work, I had to do it myself. But the next time I see him, I’m going to say, ‘Well John, I’ve done it.’ I’ve realized that if you’re an artist in 1990, you’ve got all this stuff available to help you, and you should use it.”

Henry notes that his seemingly simple monochromes are really part of a large site-specific installation. He chose the slick automotive paint, he says, “to hold up to the light” of the gallery’s large street-front windows.

“The monochromes seem like a real quick read--a red square thing with brush strokes. But then you think, ‘Why did he make these? There must be a reason.’

“I want people to think about why I did it, but the intent of these isn’t to blow people away,” continues Henry, who makes no effort to conceal the fact that monetary success and selling paintings is one of his primary goals. “You can’t separate money from art, so I’ll be really happy when somebody buys one of these, because that will tell me that I did the right thing.”

THE SCENE

Two thousand public buses in Los Angeles and Orange counties are among 13,700 buses nationwide that are showing off images by five artists including James Rosenquist and Frank Stella.

The works, which will be in the buses through January, are part of “Streetfare Journal,” a project funded by New York’s Transportation Displays Inc., in which six posters featuring an art work and an accompanying poem are hung in each participating bus.

In addition to Rosenquist and Stella, participating artists are James Cobb, who created two images, Maria Baca and Robert Goodnough. The participating poets are Jayne Cortez, Jack Marshall, Diane di Prima, Michael Smith, Gary Soto and Elizabeth Bishop.