Pat Coomey Thornton: Moment to Moment

Exhibitions

January 11 - March 9, 2023

Unexpected, 2022, oil on canvas, 48x48

Reception

AHA! Night, Thursday February 9, 6 to 8 pm
Snow Date: Thursday, February 16, 6 to 8 pm

UMass Dartmouth’s College of Visual and Performing Arts is proud to present Moment to Moment, an exhibition by New Bedford-based artist Pat Coomey Thornton in the University Art Gallery from January 11 through March 9, 2023. The reception with artist talk is planned for Thursday, February 9, 6 to 8 pm at the University Art Gallery at Star Store Campus, 715 Purchase Street in New Bedford, MA 02740 with a snow date of Thursday, February 16, 6 to 8 pm. Light refreshments will be served.

This exhibition, created specifically for UMass Dartmouth, presents abstract oil paintings and gouaches on paper created between the years 2011 and 2023. The artist invites us to enter the world of rich layers of vibrant colors, changing “moment to moment” from a darker and heavier palette to a brighter and more optimistic one, offering quiet meditation, but also tension, beauty, chaos, exuberance. The titles offer an entrance to the visitor’s musings about the meaning of the work, but also suggest a gravity of the story or feeling behind them, such as oil paintings Unexpected, 2022 or Four Stages Plus One, 2022 that refer to the artist's recently diagnosed health condition.

About her paintings, Coomey Thornton says, “moments, instances, unexpected encounters and events in our everyday life are a constant source of inspiration and content for my work. I seize upon nuances from my surroundings and life as points of departure, simplify shapes to suggest their recognizable relatives, and I hope to generate more than one interpretation. Line is important in my artworks and I envision it as a generative, time-based element. I attempt to weave together a surface of elements to create energy, tempo, and spatial relationships.”

The art historian and former UMass Dartmouth Gallery Director Lasse Antonsen notes in the exhibition’s introductory text: “[an] encounter with Pat Coomey Thornton’s art is so special. It is an encounter with an abstract world, and it is alive. It performs, and it invites us to engage. The encounter is an open experience. The paintings call on our own experiences of gardens, trees, flowers and light. This is visual thinking, and a poetics of emotions, of anxieties, of delight. In this experience we realize that we observe, that we see. The mind is stilled, and our senses are enriched. In Pat Coomey Thornton’s art, beauty is transmitted as a world of possibilities, a world of changes, a world of tenderness and sadness, and a world of joy.”

Coomey Thornton adds, “I try to capture a sense of fleeting time, a glimpse of parts that suggest the whole, and the energy of a continuum. I hope to create a work where color, texture, and mark offer the observer an absorbing entrance to their own experiences and thoughts.”

Viera Levitt, the exhibition curator, added that the show “is a visual treat for every gallery visitor and a tribute to the boundless energy, curiosity and generosity that Pat shares with New Bedford and with the world around her.”

Visitors to the exhibition are encouraged to “share their moment” by photographing a favorite detail of Pat Coomey Thornton’s paintings and posting on social media using the hashtag #findmymoment and tagging @umassdartmouthgalleries.

The exhibition was curated by Viera Levitt with introductory text from Lasse Antonsen.

The Herald News - Art Beat: Beauty beyond meaning in Pat Coomey Thornton's 'Moment to Moment'

About Pat Coomey Thornton

Pat Coomey Thornton was born and raised in Worcester, MA. She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, with a BFA and Pius XII Institute, Florence, Italy, with an MFA in Painting. Pat taught studio courses at the School of the Worcester Art Museum from 1970 to 1980 before marrying fellow painter, John Havens Thornton (1933-2021) and moving to Boston and then New Bedford. She has shown her work in the Boston area and South Coast MA., including the Rose Art Museum, the Fuller Art Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, New Bedford Art Museum/ArtWorks, and galleries in Boston, Worcester, New Bedford area, and Providence, RI. Coomey Thornton was also a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Painting and Drawing Finalist. She worked in Arts Administration at Rhode Island School of Design before retiring.

Introductory text from Lasse Antonsen

To encounter Pat Coomey Thornton’s paintings is to encounter a world of beauty. Today our relationship to beauty in art is complicated, or simply not spoken about, even though the concept of beauty has been one of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy and aesthetics.

Artists also work with concepts, but they think and exist differently from philosophy and aesthetics. They think in terms of form, color, gesture, space and shape, and what is much more important to them is to look at how beauty resides in our experience of nature.

And this is where the encounter with Pat Coomey Thornton’s art is so special. It is an encounter with an abstract world, and it is alive. It performs, and it invites us to engage. The encounter is an open experience. The paintings call on our own experiences of gardens, trees, flowers and light, and the paintings invite us inside for an experience of how the paintings themselves are created.

Each of the paintings presents its own theater, its own performance space. Some paintings consist of two, three, or more spaces, divided by horizon lines. These spaces have their own realm, their own mood, and their own energy, and are often in significant juxtaposition to each other. All of the spaces are layered, built up with successive approaches to color and gestural mark-making.

What we experience is a space unfolding. Our eyes are drawn up, over and in, and then deeper, and then back and forth. We realize and feel both hesitation and a forceful statement. Lines speak, declare, and enchant. We see lines with vibrant colors on other vibrant colors, all with different levels of luminosity.

As we study the paintings, there is a becoming. If we isolate some of the lines of the same color, we might see an outline suggesting leaves or a rhythmic play of patterns that we can then freeze for a moment as an image, before we see through those lines into other line structures and other colored spaces. In this way we encounter different narrative line structures that lie above or underneath.

This is visual thinking, and a poetics of emotions, of anxieties, of delight. In this experience we realize that we observe, that we see. The mind is stilled, and our senses are enriched.

In Pat Coomey Thornton’s art, beauty is transmitted as a world of possibilities, a world of changes, a world of tenderness and sadness, and a world of joy.

Lasse Antonsen, January 2023