John Tomlinson is an artist with a professional studio practice in drawing spanning most of his adult life.
From the drawings of 1969 displayed in the book “Nine Drawings: Skeleton Series” to about 1999, he almost exclusively drew expressively from observation in pencil and graphite. During the early 2000s he was combining his drawings with animation in digital video to create narrative motion drawings with soundworks with the themes of the passing of time, small tribulations of life and other varied themes of human interaction. 

In 2011, after a transitional hiatus of about 3 years, he began his current drawing series of large graphite drawings, The Misery of Men.

 

Tomlinson's history as a male in the 20th and 21st centuries is filled with vivid memories of all the men in his life: father, brother, uncle, grandfather, teachers and mentors, male friends, drill sergeants, bosses. They are the male protagonists and antagonists he has encountered in a variety of private and public situations. Tomlinson has an ear for what men say to men. He has an eye for their facial expressions when saying what they do and how they say it. Their voices, their expressions provide the rhythm to the music of his drawing. He believes that he is orchestrating an experience for himself, mapping his inner journey, leaving traces. Those traces have an element of darkness in them, with titles such as Modes of Escape, Dark Storms, and The Misery of Men, in which graphite and brush record his inner conversation about the misery of men and unravel hisy own deep experience as a man in the world.

 

He has exhibited his paintings and drawings in New York City and throughout the U.S., including at the Delaware Valley Arts Center in Narrowsburg, NY, and has received reviews in several publications, including Arts Magazine and The New York Times.

Tomlinson received a Fellowship for Visual Artists and Craftspersons grant from the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in 2005.

He has taught drawing for 2 years at Marlboro College in Vermont and for eight years at the National Academy of Design School of Art in New York.

He was professor of drawing in the Bachelor of Fine Arts Program of Parsons the New School for Design from 1980 to 2001.
He is director emeritus of the now-defunct (2017) New York Studio Residency Program of the 43 U.S. and Canadian colleges of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design where he was director from 1992 to 2013.

 

Tomlinson is a founding member of both the now-defunt DIGit Media Arts Exposition in Narrowsburg, NY and the thriving Barryville Area Arts Association. He is also a founding board member of the early 2000s Upper Delaware Preservation Coalition (UDPC), an environmental advocacy group whose mission was to protect and preserve the Upper Delaware River Valley of New York State and Pennsylvania against corporate anti-environmental incursion and exploitation.

 

John Tomlinson was born and educated in Boston and has lived in New York since 1961. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting from the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in New York, 1970.