About
Tom Kemp’s early training began in calligraphy, typography and lettering. In particular, he was fascinated by the brush-written inscriptions on classical Roman buildings. After studying this technique for several years he published a book on the subject and taught it in classes around the world. Formal writing is necessarily an abstraction but he wanted to take that to its limit: what would remain if all the language were removed from writing? This led to a long series of paintings pursuing this idea.
About fifteen years ago he started learning to throw pots on a wheel. He found the real-time nature of making a form without editing it, letting a formal structure grow under his control, was very ‘calligraphic’. So he worked to combine this dynamic building of three-dimensional surfaces with the equally dynamic two-dimensional conjuring of written marks: his current work is the result of this synthesis.
