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TOM HALL Congress Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
Excerpted Maine Sunday Telegram review by Philip Isaacson, September 11, 2005
TOM HALL, LANDSCAPES
Tom Hall is a highly regarded painter of the Maine landscape. I think of
him as the laureate of the Shaker orchard at Sabbathday Lake. His
engagement with the visual contradictions of that place--the openness and
the unexpected dark, guarded passages--produced images of a part of inland
Maine notable for their intensity and for their perception of the
non-monumental in our landscape. His paintings of the orchard were
reductions to essentials, inspired perhaps by the Shakers themselves.
I see much of this in "The Sebago Paintings," his current show at the June
Fitzpatrick Gallery. Hall has sketched in the area for the last 20 years.
In an effort to capture the monumentality of the region, he has reduced it
to almost iconic form.
He has simplified the fabric of the place and, in doing so, has moved a
step beyond the cliches of much of Maine landscape painting. The
simplification embraces light of or from the water, its movement, its
continuing changes, its tendency to allow the landscape around the lake to
divide the image into areas of color--one for the plane of the sky and one
for the plane of the water. If you can visualize the work of Milton Avery,
it may add clarity to what I am trying to say.
The show at Fitzpatrick is Sebago simplified by one of our most acute
observers.
Congress Street Gallery
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