Tom O'Flanagan

Tom O'Flanagan moved from Western Canada to Sault Ste Marie, Ontario to take up a studio art position at Algoma University. Here, he has been able to find inspiration in a new landscape. Tom' s work involves constructions which exist at the boundaries of painting and sculpture and juxtapose aspects of colour field abstraction, expressionist figuration and multiple references to art history and experiences in nature. These works are both tragic and highly comic in nature and employ a rough and ramshackle fabrication for an expressive effect.

He has been influenced by Roman fresco painting, the glazed oil paintings of the Northern European Renaissance and the The Kacho-Ga (flower and bird) traditions of China and Japan. Despite their refinement, these works are also formally impure, relying as they do on associations between highly realistic images of birds which are located on gesturally abstract grounds.

Tom has been the recipient of Canada Council, Saskatchewan Arts Board and Alberta Foundation for the Arts grants and became a Walter Murray Fellow of the University of Saskatchewan in 2003. He has exhibited extensively throughout Canada and his work is represented in various Canadian collections, notably the Canada Council Art Bank, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Art Gallery of Alberta. (From Art Gallery of Algoma, http://www.artgalleryofalgoma.ca)