Tom Soule                                                                                         sculptor and painter

After receiving a BA in history, I spent three years at California Institute of the Arts. Following that, I took a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture at the University of California Santa Barbara.  Afterward, I taught the visual arts – both studio courses and art history – for approximately 15 years in Santa Barbara. I taught at Westmont College, UCSB and the Santa Barbara Art Institute. Now I live in Portland, Oregon which has been my home for almost 20 years.

I have been drawing and painting all my life but my formal training in the visual arts took place at a time when what has come to be called “high modernism” was in full swing. That meant that painting was defined beginning with Cezanne and Manet, extended through the Cubists, into the post-WWII ascendance of Abstract Expressionism and finally into the artists of the 1960’s and 70’s who were carrying on what might be conceived of as the “researches” of the modernists into the limits or essentials of painting and, to a somewhat lesser degree, sculpture (i.e., Frank Stella, Morris Louis, the Colorists, Anthony Caro, David Smith). Having begun my formal training/education under these influences did not mean that I escaped what was then conceived of as mandatory training (for instance, long hours of life drawing) anymore than did those precursors of mine. And then, by saying that, I am admitting that I do indeed see myself as the heir to modernist visual artists, not merely because I am loathe to give up years of investment in the development of technique and practical understanding, but because I think painting and sculpture built upon that above-mentioned era of “research” has not been adequately pursued; that the visual arts, as well as others of the arts, have left certain loose ends untied and dangling in a field of reaction to modernism (post-modernism) leaving the modernist event unresolved and incomplete.

Left in the wake of the postmodern reaction (amazingly already a reaction almost spent), a truncated modernism may best be described out of the critical writing of Michael Fried. A major focus of modernist painting and sculpture was, at the same time, also an emphasis in the broader culture – the matter of a relation to time, to the issues of presence and duration in the act and experience of the viewer. Another matter had to do with what the fact of a given aspect of space prescribes for painting on the one hand and for sculpture on the other, for the artist on the one hand and the viewer on the other. And finally, there was one aspect, one discovery, that Fried never articulates directly as far as I know. He rigorously writes of painting (almost) exclusively in formal terms (in terms of flatness of painting surface, of structure that derives from the support, etc.), insisting nonetheless that painting as such cannot escape illusion; though he never says it, broadly accepting that a painting is a window. Yet, when writing about sculpture, even of such elemental character as that of Anthony Caro, Fried cannot but almost immediately introduce matters of representation – one might even say, despite it being of a very general nature, of subject matter. (This does not mean that by “subject matter” or “representation” he means – or I mean – pictorial.)

At least these several unrealized issues may be seen as descriptive – not, mind you, necessarily consciously prescriptive – of my work. It is all the more evident that I am dealing with these particular factors because I am both a sculptor and a painter – and it is evident on the face of it that I conceive of the realization for each discipline will likely differ.