Tommy Fitzpatrick | Campanile, 2017

My name is Tommy Fitzpatrick, and I was born in Dallas, Texas, and currently live in New Braunfels, Texas. I received my art degree from UT in Austin and my Master's in painting at Yale University. In addition to being a professional artist, I am also the professor of painting at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. For the past 20 years, color, space and architecture have been the primary sources of inspiration for my work. The painting Campanile in The Lancaster Collection came from my exhibition entitled Crystal Cities in 2017. The show was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's 1940 project of the same name, an all-encompassing live workspace that was never realized. For the paintings in the show, I created sculptural motifs as stand-ins for the ideas of the architect. Campanile is based on one of these freestanding plexiglas sculptures in which the plastic pierces the picture plane, taking on the illusion of a tower-like form. The imagery is rendered with a hard-edged painting technique in which paint is applied using industrial tape. The still life format allows for the viewer to read the painting in several ways with the colors, cast light, and shadows bringing to question where the form ends and the space around it begins.