Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

During the two decades before his death in 2007, the English artist, Tom Fairs, drew from life daily in small notebooks, acutely observing and vividly rendering scenes of London's Hampstead Heath and the surrounding Georgian architecture, streets and gardens. With startling variety in the arrangement of forms, Fairs depicted places and things around him with uncommon dedication and ardor. Trees, bushes, and grassy meadows are all captured with a hallucinatory attention to detail and a thorough, painstaking desire to represent everyday nature as faithfully as possible. Though it is known that the drawings were source material for future paintings, their quiet, deceptively modest, and remarkable beauty puts them in a class all their own.

This show consists of the contents of one specific sketchbook done in June and July of 2004. There is cohesion from image to image, which reveals Fairs' dexterous movements through and around the drawings and between the pages. By "framing" twelve of the twenty-four drawings with a pencil line border, he curated his work presumably denoting their finished state. In this we see Fairs' own conception of them as a distinctive set due to the subtle linking of shapes and themes by way of personal edits that cumulatively makes for a decidedly cinematic sequence. Arresting and sensitive, they give credence to what Fairs himself wrote about his motives and mission. "My interest is primarily in things seen: landscape, interiors, still life where, in the light of the imagination, the commonplace may be transformed into the extraordinary. ...I try to achieve a brief glimpse of the implicit order that lies beneath what we perceive as reality."

Tom Fairs was a respected and admired teacher for many years at London's Central School of Art and Design. An inventive draftsman with a far-reaching repertoire of wavering contour lines, staccato dashes and thick scribbles, he summoned up not only the city's compacted jumble of flora and culture, but the sounds of rustling leaves and far away traffic, the smells of coal smoke and grass, and even the colors of wet earth and overcast skies. Their humble aspects notwithstanding, there has been growing and enthusiastic posthumous reception to their pleasures and attributes out of proportion to their scale. These "little" drawings have unexpectedly caught on in the New York art world, with their first ever showing at KS Art in 2011 garnering a glowing review by Ken Johnson in The New York Times, who lauded their "outsider like intensity." On several Top Ten lists for 2011, including Matthew Higgs in Artforum and Roberta Smith in the New York Times, and written about by Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, their reception is a happy postscript to Fair's relative obscurity. These unassuming, unspectacular views of the natural world totally immerse the viewer in London, the Heath with its woods and paths, conjuring up a passionately delineated universe completely of Fairs' own making.