Tom Orr | Waterfall Drawing G and Waterfall Drawing B, 2005

My name is Tom Orr. I'm an artist living and working in Dallas, Texas. Texas native, I received my degree from Rhode Island School of Design and Sculpture. From the beginning of my career, I had a basic idea to take existing sculptural forms and simplify them and to show the viewer these forms in a way that maybe they hadn't seen before or thought about. In doing this, I employed various techniques like reflected light, reflected color, shadows, scale, repetitive line, and Moiré patterns. Over the years, I've made installation work, large public sculpture, as well as gallery scale pieces. Also, I've always done some form of printmaking. My first series of prints was about different views of waterfalls. At The Lancaster Hotel, there are two monoprints from that first series. These prints are line drawings of two waterfalls drawn on striped backgrounds. When you put curved lines over straight lines or line over line, you get a Moiré pattern, which in this case shows itself as a dotted line or a bit of a blur. What excited me about these prints was that you would get a feeling of falling water. In reality, what you're seeing is a very simple Moiré pattern that gives you a sense of motion. But that feeling of motion or falling water is actually stopped frozen in these prints. These images, to me, allow my mind to carry on to where that water continues to flow and takes the simple line drawing a little further.