The second in our series of blogs which highlights and explores key works in the Reading Foundation for Art collection, selected by the RFA Trustees.
'A Trustee's Selection: Part Two' presents the work of Tom Cartmill which was acquired for the collection in 2008 and has been selected by Reading Foundation's Vice Chairman, Jim Attewell.
"To converge: to come together from different directions so as eventually to meet."
Drawing has an immediate appeal - this drawing also has a quality of mystery.
It is beautifully and simply made using only one grade of pencil – pressing harder to create the darks and creating the swirling band that runs across it by the absence of any mark.
It was made while living in Andalucia and studying Moorish art. The love of mathematics and proportion is present and a fragment of Arabic script appears to float above the surface.
I see many convergences here: Northern and Southern Europe; history and modernity;
mathematics and art; pencil and paper.
Jim Attewell - Vice Chairman of the Reading Foundation for Art
In 2008, Reading Foundation for Art acquired two works for the growing collection, by artist Reading artist Tom Cartmill. The work which attracted the interest of the Trustees was from a series of drawings and paintings exploring notions of time, space, patination and erosion to create surfaces painstakingly worked and reworked with gesso, acrylics and ink. The resulting images reflect this Reading artist's interest in Islamic and Zen Buddhist calligraphy and art.
Together with 'Convergences XXI', pictured above, the Foundation also acquired a large mixed media work by the artist exploring overlapping ideas about geological time and archaeology, the changing movements and textures found in nature and the layering of his memories.
Tom Cartmill is based in Reading, working from a studio unit on a farm just outside the town. Now settled in Berkshire, Tom has spent much of his adult life overseas, particularly in New Zealand, Southern Spain and Sicily. His work is exhibited widely and can be found in numerous private collections around the world, and also in a growing number of public and corporate collections.
Tom is gaining increasing recognition for his drawing: his work having been selected for a number of major exhibitions including the RA Summer Exhibition, London (2016 & 2017); The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2021 & 2020) and the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (2019, 2017 & 2016). He also won the Rabley Editioning Prize in 2017 (seeing the launch of a new print edition at the London Original Print Fair at The Royal Academy of Arts, in 2018).
Amongst other exhibitions, his drawings have been selected for the Derwent Drawing Prize (2022 & 2016), The National Open Art Exhibition, The Discerning Eye (2018 & 2020), The Art Gemini Prize (2017) and the The New Art Prize, which toured the UK during 2020 and 2021. In 2022, on the strength of his submitted mixed media works, Tom was selected as a 'Future Now Artist' for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2022 (this comes after a prior selection in 2019 for his submission of drawings). Details from the artist's website.
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