Nelson Sullivan’s Portrait Back Home

Tom's Comments about the portrait:

Nelson Sullivan’s portrait is not signed nor does it have any writing on the back. It could have been done in 1985. Nelson died July 3, 1989.
In his timeline:
http://tomlohre.com/timeline.htm
Nelson's nor Yvonne Sherwell’s portrait are listed, done at the same time. Nelson may have given me little money for the portrait and Yvonne’s was not paid for. It hung in her home for a few years till I got it back because it was taking up too much room in her small apartment. Nelson's portrait hung in this spacious home till his death and then it moved to Park Avenue, his brother's home.

The style of these two portraits dates the work 1985. Tom was painting on thin synthetic canvas painted with polyurethane varnish before starting the work. The painting is al la prima, meaning it was done all at once.

This was a struggling time for him. Tom had been working on a painting machine and that secreted color from four tubes. Tom painted with the same four colors for a year. These works seem to use those four colors. They were selected to represent all colors when mixed, similar to process printing colors, magenta, cyan, yellow and white.

The paintings were struggled. Tom had been making a living as a fine artist since 1978 but his interest in advancing art got in the way of just painting for the crowd. After mastering portrait painting and genre landscape painting, he grew restless. Using the same four colors for a year turned out to be a bad lesson for you do not use all your tools to create. Hamstringing the process was a bad idea.








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A Look Back: 50 Years After Stonewall
Opening On: Thursday, July 11, 6 – 8 PM – July 27, 2019
Fort Gansevoort presents A Look Back: 50 Years After Stonewall, organized by Lucy Beni and Adam Shopkorn. The exhibition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a six-day riot said to have been spontaneously set off by Marsha P. Johnson in protest of one of many regular police raids at The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar located in New York City’s Greenwich Village. This event marks the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement and the contemporary fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the United States.