The Knapp Gallery continues its tradition of First Friday openings and welcomes back Tom Brady in his latest body of paintings Why is it Wonderful? An Art of Experiences. Brady is Knapp's senior staffer, touting thirty-five plus years of accomplishment. Deemed a "New American Realist," Brady situates himself as a visual historian of Philadelphia culture. Utilizing three traditional distinctions, landscape, portraiture and architecture, Brady immortalizes Philadelphia with his non-traditional heavy textured impastoesque brushstroke.
Tom Brady applies his paint as though it is building something. It surges toward you as if to relate a burningly vital message. Above and beyond a deeply moving body of work, what Brady and his paint are building is, in reality, a platform - a platform to lift up the everyday.
Brady, trained at the Tyler School of Art and Amherst College, has a strict work ethic and is time- and honor-bound to his process: pastel sketch after pastel sketch, from life, are whittled down to the singular inspiration that becomes oil paint and canvas (or wood), through what can only be described as an act of true athleticism.
His paintings are alarming. No, there is no gruesome subject matter - just the real moments in everyday time and space. Yet these moments leap off the canvas with an urgency that defies their composition. In some works, like "Husband and Wife", normally subdued elements, like a paved road in the background, thrust the central figures toward you in a rush of color. That thrusting is not an affront, or just for fun. It is a call to action. Despite their standing in the world of realism (at least as it is rapidly being defined), these are not paintings to be looked at and compared against reality. They are paintings that require us to do something. Perhaps what they require is that we live in our moments, big and small, and try desperately not to miss a thing.