Tina Neylon | The Irish Examiner | 1996
The picture tells a story
TOM CLIMENT is only 26, yet is beginning to make a mark for himself as a painter.
I was studying engineering and attending night classes in painting at the same time, when suddenly it just seemed to make more sense,” he says.
“At school I enjoyed painting, but I didn’t feel I was good enough to do it full-time, but then I found I was spending more time at it than anything else”. He studied at the Crawford College of Art from 1991 -95.
He hadn’t regretted the decision. “When you’re slightly older, it makes more sense, you have a clearer image in your head of what you want to do. I always knew I would paint, it just took me some time to get around to it.”
His work is strongly influenced by Spanish and Italian Masters.
“We used to spend nearly every summer in Valencia, so perhaps that did have some effect on me”, he smiles.
Last year Brian Fallon selected Tom for the Victor Treacy Award, for the best emerging artist in Ireland. And also picked his work for his recent Critic’s choice Exhibition n the Temple Bar Gallery.
Tom’s paintings are very large, and full of rich colours He works directly onto the canvas. “I use acrylic for the first couple of layers, and that dries quickly. It’s when I apply the oil that the painting really comes together. Before I start I have a general idea of what I want, but I work the final images out as I paint
“They’re all kinds of interiors, three dimensional spaces, and there’s a story in each of my paintings but it’s ambiguous, which forces people to look at them more. There are semi-abstract figures in some of them. ”Though he feels he’s been influenced by artists like Goya and Carravaggio, he sees art as a contiuum and admires Matisse ad Bacon too, “though maybe not for their subject matter. What interest me most is the how”.
Tom likes Cork with its ‘small community of artists, all of whom know each other’. He has his own studio in the city, and enjoys meeting other artists regularly, particularly the Blackwater studio artists. He particularly admires painter Maurice Desmond, and he very much enjoyed studying under Jill Dennis and Vera Ryan.
“It’s funny really how you move on. Now when I see my paintings in Temple Bar I don’t feel the same about them. Maybe it’s because I know they’ll go to whoever has bought them. It forces me to do something new”.