ART NEWS
Vermont State Art Collection Acquires
Five Tom Leytham Watercolors
In late 2017, an anonymous art donor asked Vermont State Curator David Schutz to select five watercolors by artist/architect Tom Leytham for inclusion in the State Art Collection.
Many of Leytham’s watercolors document disappearing industrial or mill buildings in Vermont and are light and fresh, even if the deteriorating subject matter is not. All five works have been placed by the State Curator’s office for the 2018 legislative session in House committee rooms in the State House.
Tom Leytham is a Vermont-registered architect and artist who lives in Middlesex. His visual narrative is of the forgotten and ignored Vermont vernacular working landscape. Working with watercolors and the white surface of watercolor paper, Leytham creates complex pictorial environments that illuminate a process of visual discovery of a richly built environment. Just as the actual ruins invite prolonged visual exploration, through the use of partial views, negative space, dramatic perspective, and rich detail to engage the viewer’s imagination, Leytham’s work focuses attention on elements of detail, and construction. The duality of density and emptiness in the work lends an air of mystery and elegy to the landscape images.
Leytham’s architectural work has been featured in House Beautiful, Handyman Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Fabric Architecture, and has been published in The Compact House Book, Small House Designs, and The Book of Small House Designs. The Montpelier Historical Society and the Preservation Trust of Vermont have recognized Leytham’s architectural preservation work. His work has also been been featured in the INDA Yearbook of Drawing, the Roberts Delineation Competition and on WCAX-TV. He was awarded a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council in 2013.
Leytham started to document the disappearing built landscape of Vermont in the early 2010s and has had 7 solo shows since 2015, including the Bennington Museum and the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, New York. A show of recent work, “Hiding in Plain Sight”, opens at AVA Gallery in Lebanon, New Hampshire on June 8, 2018.
(adapted from press material provided by the State Curator’s Office)
Image: (top)
Grist Mill, Guildhall
by Tom Leytham
18″x24″
watercolor
2017
Courtesy of the Vermont State Curator’s Office, Montpelier
Image: (center)
Waits River Village
by Tom Leytham
18″x24″
watercolor
2016
Courtesy of the Vermont State Curator’s Office, Montpelier