Thomas Downing, “Untitled”, 1950, Acrylic on Unprimed Canvas, 243.8 x 225.4 cm, Private Collection

Born in 1928 in Suffolk, Virginia, American painter Thomas Downing initially studied English literature at Randolph-Mason College in Ashland, Virginia, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1948. After frequent visits to exhibitions held at Randolph-Mason and local museums, he eventually decided to study art. Downing moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute of Art, where he was influenced by the New York School of painters. With a grant given to him in 1950 by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, he was able to travel and study in Europe, briefly enrolling in the Académie Julien in Paris.

In Paris, Thomas Downing secured a position as a studio assistant for the painter Fernand Léger in 1951, eventually exhibiting a series of his own gouaches at Paris’ Galerie Huit. After a short service in the US Army, he moved in 1953 to Washington, DC, working as a high school teacher. Downing attended summer sessions at Catholic University, where he studied under and was influenced by painter Kenneth Nolan, one of the founders of the Washington Color School of painting, a flourishing abstract art movement emphasizing pure color. An established member of Washington’s art community by 1958, Downing had his first one-man show with the Sculptors Studio in 1959. By the early 1960s, he began producing canvases that were composed of grids and circles of dots of varying color, a motif which became recognizable as his body of work.

Thomas Downing’s work explores the formal possibilities of color and color-space, establishing that as the sole subject of his compositions. His circles of varying hues and colors seem to float in an undefined space, with each set of color appearing on a flat plane, but collectively presenting a depth of space. Downing’s specific color choices suggest the modern design principles of the Bauhaus movement, particularly the color-space theories of painter and instructor Josef Albers. 

Following a series of successful solo shows in the DC area, several of Downing’s dot paintings were included in Clement Greenberg’s 1964 traveling exhibition “Post-Painterly Abstraction” and the New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s influential 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye”. In 1966, Downing included a series of shaped canvases to his works in the “Systematic Painting” show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

Downing taught at the Corcoran School of Art from 1965 to 1968, influencing artists such as Sam Gilliam and Rockne Krebs. He moved to New York to teach at the New School of Visual Art, and after a brief tenure at the University of Houston in 1975, settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In his later years, he had many exhibitions, including tow at the Osuna Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1979 and 1980,  and one at The Phillips Collection in 1985, the year of his death. 

Thomas Downing’s work is in a number of collections, both private and public, including the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, both in Washington, DC, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California.