Tom Fowler, 53, Modern artist filled his colorful canvases with images of repeated words
Hoodoo
May 13, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/
Modern artist Tom Fowler of San Francisco, who filled his
colorful canvases with images of words repeated over -- including
a painting with the word "sex" copied 14,874 times -- has died.
Mr. Fowler, 53, died Saturday at San Francisco General Hospital
after a brief illness involving complications from pneumonia and
blood poisoning.
His friend, Julio Cesar Martinez, said Mr. Fowler's illness
stemmed from an abscessed tooth that went untreated.
He was a former director of a South of Market advertising agency,
but quit that job to concentrate on fine art. Mr. Fowler's work
included paintings of coffee cups and of his travels along the
California coast.
While creating those works, he drank up to 20 cups of coffee a
day. He worked in a studio on Potrero Hill and frequented nearby
coffee houses, where he would invariably greet friends, art
lovers and fellow caffeine addicts with a cheery "Hey, Daddy-o!''
"I like to pace around, I like to work nervously, sometimes I
chain smoke, sometimes I drink too much coffee," he said in a
2000 interview . "Maybe I've found a good way to live."
That year, he created "Mud,'' a series of 50 pictures of coffee
cups that was exhibited at several San Francisco coffee houses.
"I wanted to do something just kind of mindless," he said at the
time. "I had been doing stuff based on the Seven Deadly Sins, and
I needed a break."
Mr. Fowler's interest in art began when he was 5 and watched his
mother draw rustic figures. He followed suit and soon produced
his first crude work: a rendition of Custer's Last Stand. He was
hooked.
"I thought, 'Oh, man, I can kind of create my own universe,' " he
said in a Chronicle interview in 2000.
In recent years, his works were shown at the Canvas Gallery, the
Melting Point Gallery and the Headlands Center for the Arts,
where he was well-known for his series of repetitive-text images.
In each, a single word -- "sex'' or "sin'' or "meaning" -- would
be repeated thousands of times in unusual patterns.
He was a resident artist at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in
San Francisco. He painted sports pictures for the San Francisco
49ers and Oakland A's magazines, he painted a mural for the
Ozanam Homeless Shelter in San Francisco, and he painted a
portrait of King Lear for the San Francisco Opera.
A native of Tucson, Ariz., Mr. Fowler grew up on cattle ranch and
attended the Art Institute of Colorado in Boulder. He came to San
Francisco in 1980.
He was a drummer, songwriter, Sierra backpacker, drug-abuse
counselor and San Francisco Giants fan.
Mr. Fowler is survived by his son, Zachary of Phoenix, Ariz.
A memorial gathering, concert and art show will be held at 2 p.m.
Sunday at the Melting Point Gallery, 1340 Bryant St., San Francisco.
--
It's a big old goofy world. - John Prine
Louisiana Lou
> Tom Fowler -- artist painted coffee cups, repeated words
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Here is the artist's web site.
http://www.tomfowler.xbuild.com/