This week’s ”Art” page profiles Drew Snyder, a 24 year old painter and Fort Worth native who opened an art gallery in the small beach community of Leucadia in northern San Diego County, California. It’s barely an exaggeration to say that he considers it his young life’s mission to promote Fort Worth-raised artists like Zack Hawkins, Ben Groff, John and Steven Hook, himself, and Ron Tomlinson on the West Coast.
The link, other than Cowtown, is that Snyder, Hawkins, Groff, and the Hooks all studied with legendary FW painter Tomlinson. The website for Snyder’s Andrews Gallery features a large collection of canvas images by all six painters. It’s interesting to compare how the younger painters took Tomlinson’s vision and techniques and moved in different directions with them. The fancy word “liminal” – which means existing between two spaces or two realities — has been used to describe Tomlinson’s sometimes eerie portraits and still lifes. The more you look at them, the more that makes sense.
