Tone Connors

Region: Midwest

An image appears in my mind of a finished painting. I paint it.
And at that point my process of painting begins.

The work slowly unfolds after months of covering, uncovering, moving, sliding, pushing and pulling. I sometimes toil over a painting for more than a year. The finished product is always worlds away from the initial inception. I think of my paintings as ever evolving entities. I sometimes view my work during the process as if nature or someone else created it. This separation enables me to enhance or improve the work based on my own personal vision of what that painting should look like. One of the more successful tools in my work has been to ruin what I think is working if it occurs before the final image is realized.

I work on as many as ten paintings at a time and all of these paintings will go through hundreds of inventive and re-inventive moments before they are complete. During my process each painting goes through a multi-layered collage of visual information with different stylized applications of acrylic, allowing single lines and moments to become distinct from other areas. Some of these applications I have used for the last fifteen years others are newly invented and added to my library of visual symbols. Each event in every composition functions both on its own and as a part of the whole.