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Lina Tharsing. Photo by Guy Mendes
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Married for more than 40 years, Lexington couple Ann Tower and Robert Tharsing were both not only artists but also tireless advocates of the arts in Kentucky. Photo by Lina Tharsing
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Work by Robert Tharsing spills out of every corner of the North Lexington studio that the late artist designed. His daughter Lina Tharsing (pictured) has taken on the monumental task of cataloging her father’s extensive library of work to curate a multi-venue retrospective happening this month. Photo by Guy Mendes
In the north Lexington studio that local artist Lina Tharsing shared with her mother, Ann Tower, and father, Robert Tharsing, paintings spill out from every available space. Robert Tharsing, who passed away in December 2015 after a long illness, was a prolific painter and sculptor, with a career that spanned nearly five decades. His wife, Ann Tower, who passed away just shy of a year after her husband, painted for nearly as many years. Add Lina Tharsing’s own nationally recognized growing body of work, to that extensive collection, and you find yourself immersed in a space filled with color and shape and beauty.
Robert Tharsing grew up in Southern California and studied art at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. After teaching stints in Berkeley and at Carnegie Mellon, he came to teach at the University of Kentucky in 1971, where he remained until his 2002 retirement and served as chair of the school’s art department for several years.
It was at UK that Tharsing met his future wife, who came to UK to study art in 1969. Tower – a longtime advocate for the arts in Kentucky whose career included managing and owning gallery spaces and writing art criticism for the Lexington Herald-Leader – spent part of her childhood on Long Island before moving with her family to Kentucky. The couple married in 1973 and embarked on a life together that in many ways, revolved around creating, sharing and advocating for art.
“This might be a cliche to say, but his life was art,” said Lina Tharsing of her father. “He was an endless maker of things. He made art books, he made jewelry, he made carvings, he made this meticulously tiled pond in the backyard … he designed furniture, he made these beautiful shadowboxes that were really amazing.
“His artistic scope was so diverse and huge that it’s almost impossible to share,” she added.
While trying to showcase the entire scope of Tharsing’s lifetime of artistic endeavors might be an overly ambitious goal, his career will be honored and remembered this month in a local retrospective spanning three Lexington venues. It’s a project that Lina Tharsing began with her mother last year and has been continuing on her own since Tower’s unexpected passing in November.
The concept for the multi-venue retrospective emanated with Stephanie Harris, executive director of the Lexington Art League. After Tharsing’s passing in 2015, she approached Tower with the idea for a multi-gallery retrospective and catalog of her late husband’s work, that would honor his life and artistic contributions. Harris, who considers Tower a friend and mentor, wanted to provide the community an opportunity to see how Tharsing’s work evolved painting after painting, decade by decade.
“We see different elements appear and reappear, illustrating his tireless work ethic and his determination to find order within his works while gaining a greater understanding of the world and our place in it,” Harris said. “All of those notions are evident within his work, and they are brilliant and full of inspiration and beauty.”
Up until Tower’s passing, Lina worked closely with her mother to curate the retrospective and catalog her father’s work. She said she has found that continuing the work on the catalog and retrospective has been a challenge without her mother – certainly emotionally, but also because she is now working without her mother’s extensive and intimate knowledge of her father’s work.
“I’m trying to discover a lot of things by researching him and reading his sketchbooks, while also trying to keep in mind what my mother would have wanted for the catalog or exhibition and what she would have contributed,” Lina said.
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According to art journals that Lina Tharsing has used to help catalog her father’s work, Robert Tharsing’s acrylic painting “Cumberland Island Dream” was based on a dream. Photo furnished
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"Pandora's Box." Robert Tharsing’s work ranged from still lifes and landscapes to abstract paintings and sculptures made of driftwood and other materials. Photo furnished
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"An Artist's Life." Robert Tharsing’s work ranged from still lifes and landscapes to abstract paintings and sculptures made of driftwood and other materials. Photo furnished
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"Beside the Pool." Robert Tharsing’s work ranged from still lifes and landscapes to abstract paintings and sculptures made of driftwood and other materials. Photo furnished
The works selected for the retrospective have been chosen with the individual gallery spaces in mind. Pieces on display at Ann Tower Gallery will be selected from his more recent works, while the largest part of the show will be housed at the Lexington Art League’s Loudoun House and will focus on Tharsing’s older work.
“I originally thought I would hang the show in an academic way, as in a museum, but the Loudoun House features so many architectural elements that must be incorporated into the hanging,” Lina said. “I’ve decided that we’ll hang the works there as you would hang work in a house.”
A third venue, the small downtown gallery Institute 193, will house a specific series of Tharsing’s works from the 1970s where he coated articles of clothing in resin and then painted on top of the stiffened products. It was an experiment in alternative forms, said his daughter.
“He was trying to get away from the stretched canvas, away from the square or rectangle,” Lina explained.
The design of the show’s catalog – a 300-page book that Lina has been putting together to highlight the art featured in the retrospective – also takes into account the artist’s wide variety of media. The catalog is broken into 16 categories of work, including “disaster paintings” (paintings of natural and manmade disasters), work inspired by Asian art, abstract works and sculptures of what Tharsing referred to as “animals without brains.” The catalog will be available at the participating galleries and will be available online and through bookstores.
Lina has found that her father wrote about painting as much as he painted, and delving into his extensive collection of journals and sketchbooks has been a process that has allowed her to get inside his head and get to know her father in new and sometimes unexpected ways.
“He was obsessed with and obsessive about painting,” she said. “He painted every day, even when he was ill.”
Much of Tharsing’s journaling revolved around his dreams, which Lina accounts to “a deep desire to know more about his unconscious self.”
“He would be intrigued by something then start painting it, and then wonder why he was drawn to those items and what was the deeper meaning behind that curiosity,” she said.
Though she said he was a formalist when it came to painting, Lina remembers her father as being a rebellious person – someone who thought of himself as an outsider even though he was an academic.
“He was always paying attention to what was happening in the art world and considered himself as just an obscure artist in Kentucky,” she said. “That gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do artistically.”
The upcoming retrospective will give the community the opportunity to see both Tharsing’s commitment to the process and the formality of his work, as well as his more “rebellious” pieces.
It’s fitting that one-third of the retrospective will be the final installation at the Ann Tower Gallery, which Tower opened inside the Downtown Arts Center in 2002. Lina has long managed the gallery, working alongside her mother for several years while also working as her father’s gallery assistant and creating her own works. But when the lease for the gallery expires this June, she plans to close the gallery. She and her mother had been discussing the future of the gallery before Tower passed away, but Tower’s death made the decision to close the space easier for Lina.
Robert Tharsing in the studio with his commission for Bellarmine college. Photo by Ann Tower
Lina Tharsing in the family studio. Photo by Guy Mendes
“Running a gallery was perfect for her and made her very happy,” Tharsing said. “While my passion is painting, my mom’s passion was people.”
While curating the show and managing the estate has taken up much of her time this past year, Lina is looking forward to having more time in the future to paint again and refocus on her own career. A lauded artist in her own right, she has been profiled in The Oxford American Magazine and Garden & Gun, and currently has a piece on display in the Atlanta Contemporary Museum.
Growing up as the child of two artists, it might seem inevitable that the younger Tharsing’s own work would be heavily influenced by that of her parents – but she would say the answer to that would be both yes and no.
“They were careful to never teach me or tell me what to do with my art when I was young in order to not influence me,” she said. “They let me absorb and take what I wanted from growing up around artists.
“For a long time I thought that we didn’t have anything in common in our work, but as I’ve been completed immersed in their studios and work, I now see so many similarities among us,” Lina continued. “My mom was my dad’s student, and they continued to influence each other, but I think it’s also in my DNA. I recently found some art books that my father made that look very much like things I’ve made, but I’d never seen them before. I’m discovering things like that all the time.”
EXHIBIT DETAILS
Lexington Art League presents Robert Tharsing: a Retrospective
On display April 28-June 11
Loudoun House, 209 Castlewood Dr.
Gallery hours: Tues.-Thurs.: 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; Fri., 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat.-Sun.,
1-4 p.m.
Special events include a “Fourth Friday” reception featuring music from Warren Byrom on April 28 (7-9 p.m.), and a closing reception on May 26.
Robert Tharsing: Abroad
On display May 19-June 30
Ann Tower Gallery, 141 E. Main St.
(second floor of Downtown Arts Center)
Gallery hours: Tues.-Sat., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun., 10 a.m.-2 p.m.
(Visitors encouraged to call 425-1188 before stopping by)
Special events include a preview opening on May 14 (5-8 p.m.) and Gallery Hop reception on May 19 (5-8 p.m.)
Robert Tharsing: Second-Hand Shapes
On display May 4-20
Institue 193, 193 N. Limestone St.
Gallery hours: Wed.- Sat., 11a.m.-6 p.m., and by appointment.
Special events include an opening reception on May 4 (6-8 p.m.)