Background
Thomas Downing was born in 1928 in Suffolk, Virginia, United States.
Thomas Downing was born in 1928 in Suffolk, Virginia, United States.
Thomas Downing studied at Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948. He then studied at the Pratt Institute, a well-known art school in Brooklyn, New York, until 1950. That year he received a grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, enabling him to travel to Europe, where he studied briefly at the Académie Julian in Paris.
In 1954, Downing enrolled in a summer institute at Catholic University, studying under Kenneth Noland. He became a friend of Noland, who became a significant influence on Downing's art.
In 1951 Downing returned to the United States, and after serving in the U.S. Army, settled in Washington, D.C., where he began to teach, in 1953.
In the late 1950s, Downing shared a studio with Howard Mehring, another artist of the Washington Color School and Color Field painting. In 1959 Downing first began using the small dot in his work, a motif he explored fully into the 1970s.
Downing exhibited in a group show at Jefferson Place Gallery in 1960 and had his first solo exhibition there in the spring of 1961. In 1964 Clement Greenberg included Noland, Mehring, Downing and others in his traveling museum exhibition called Post-painterly Abstraction.
From 1965 to 1968, Downing taught at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. There he taught several people who in their turn became artists influenced by Downing's ideas, including Sam Gilliam. There he was influential for the next generation of DC color artists including Sam Gilliam. He moved to New York in 1970 and taught at the School of Visual Arts. He then accepted a position at the University of Houston, Texas in 1975.
In the last ten years of his life, Downing lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He had many exhibits during these years, several of them in Washington: two at the Osuna Gallery in 1979 and 1980 and at The Phillips Collection in 1985.
Thomas Downing died in October, 1985 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the age of 57. In its obituary the "Washington Times" characterized his death as mysterious.
Downing was noted for his paintings that to a large extent consisted of circles arranged in precise patterns on the canvas, with colors often chosen according to ideas of symmetry. Downing's "Spot Paintings" were his best known works.
Currently, his works are in many collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, District of Columbia; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, District of Columbia; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California; and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma.
Untitled
Red Twelve
Summer
Untitled
Troll (Series #5)
Twenty
Untitled
France Blue
Cut Series #4
Quilt
Dream Rate
Grid Twenty-Eight
Fold Twelve
Red
Phased Red
Korfu
Grid Twenty-Nine
Universal Joint
Untitled
Untitled (Black Star)
Interior
Untitled
Inning
Red Plum
Untitled
Brown and Blue Plank
Four Blue Five
Horseshow Two
Green Melt
Green Square
Rivet Lilt
Fold One
Grid #9: Saranac
Untitled
Untitled
Reel
Red Span
Tsivory
Fold Seven
Fahrenheit
Untitled
Grid #8
Untitled
Blue Space
Untitled
On Blue
Untitled
Grid Forty
Thomas Downing was a member of the Washington Color Field Movement.
Quotes from others about the person
Sam Gilliam: "Tom was one of the first persons that let me know that the Washington Color School painting wasn't about what was being written by Greenberg. Tom would interestingly tell you that it was only about seeing; and then later he would tell you that it was only about color; or that it was only about the music of color; or the way you could structure color. And then later he would say that it was like pop art."
