Tom McIntyre is an emerging visual artist based in Reading, whose work can be seen as the combination of hard-edge geometric abstraction and gestural abstract expressionism. In 2021, he spent a six-month long Erasmus scholarship program in Budapest.
– Is there a specific life experience that led you to create?
– I have always been creative, even from a very young age, but it wasn’t until around 2017 that I took a more focused approach to my practice, quitting my job at the time and setting up my first studio in a friends shed, in their garden. Prior to this I had undergone a period of recovery after being hospitalised in 2016; that period of time and the events surrounding it served as a wake up call for me.
– How did you develop your art skills?
– Being persistent and always being open minded to the fact that I never want to stop learning. I’m also never going to pretend like I know exactly what I’m doing and attempt to uphold that with convoluted art terms. It’s simple; the flow state of making is where I feel most comfortable and I stay there for as long as possible, not only until the project I’m working on is resolved but until I’ve learnt something new about my practice and myself.
– Where do you find inspiration?
– I try not to neglect anything I’m experiencing. I think being generally aware of how you feel internally and what is capturing your attention externally is really important to allow ideas to form. If those two things cross over, that’s usually a good indication for me personally to engage with an idea or project.
I’m also in complete acknowledgment of the overstimulating world we live in now too, so it’s not unbeknown for me to turn my phone off for days at a time, and just live without being forcefully bombarded with information that I don’t really need. It’s like a recalibration – I get a lot of inspiration from those periods of time, much to the frustration of people who need to get hold of me.
– How do you define your artistic practice? (The medium and technique of choice, the topics you’re dealing with)
– Genre wise my work would be considered geometric abstraction. I haven’t given it all that much thought yet but I have a certain affinity to the term Abstract Engineering (You heard it here first!), My dad was an engineer and I know being exposed to that type of thinking from a young age has directly informed the way in which I work today.
– How do you manage your social media platforms as an artist? What is your opinion about the online presence of an artist?
– As much as there is clear benefits to using social media as an artist it is all too easy to forget that these platforms are tools and not an identity.
Finding a way in which these platforms can work for you rather than against you as an artist can be an interesting process, but in my opinion focusing on how you’re perceived online as an artist rather than actually creating anything is an unfortunate byproduct of broader issues relating to the use of social media. For me personally, it has, and always will be about the work and the people who genuinely connect with it.
– What are your current projects that you are working on?
– Recently I’ve been exploring using different printing techniques, specifically screen printing and lino cut printing. I’ve really enjoyed the process and it’s been interesting to experiment with methods that I usually apply to my large scale canvas works to these projects instead.
– Plans for the future?
– To be in the present!
It’s worth looking a little into the future, on November 11th he is going to have a solo exhibition in Oxford, in the exhibition space of the Old Fire Station!
Further information: Primary Conditions.
