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Articles  Born in rural upstate New York, Toby Tover has been living in the Bay Area for the past 45 years and this is where her art was born. She attended both UC Berkeley and UCLA and currently takes art studio classes privately and at UC Extension and San Francisco Art Institute. Her most recent solo exhibitions have included METROPOLITAN TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION - "Transformations" -Joseph P. Bort MetroCenter Bldg., Oakland, CA July 11 - December 31, 2005; Arts Benicia Presents at US Bank, Benicia (May-July 2005); Hunters Point and ProArts Open Studios (May and June 2005); and C'era Una Volta Ristorante and Galleria (July-Sept. 2004 & 2005) in the city of Alameda. A partial list of juried group exhibitions includes: "Timing," Ceres Gallery, New York City (July-Aug 2005); Alameda Art Center (2004); Epperson Gallery, Crockett, Calif. (2004); Artisans Gallery, National Juried Exhibition, Mill Valley (2003); Sun Gallery, Hayward; Ceres Gallery, Chelsea, New York City ( 2003, 2004, 2005); Alameda Art Center (2004 & July 2005); Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek (Dec 2002); and "New Visions: INTRODUCTIONS," ProArts Gallery (2000 and 2003). In 2001 Toby was the Grand Prize Winner "Arts on Fire V" competition at Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica (juried by Phil Linhares, Chief Art Curator, Oakland Museum of California). She was awarded a solo exhibition at the Sanchez Art Center in 2002. Tover also won first prize in painting at the Lamorinda Arts Alliance Annual Exhibit at the John Muir Medical Center, Walnut Creek, Calif., and was the third place winner in the Mixed Media, Artists Society Annual Show at John Muir Medical Center, Walnut Creek. Her work is in many Bay Area and national private collections. Tover draws inspiration from at least three international trips yearly, recently traveling to Japan, Morocco, Vietnam, China, Tibet, India, Western and Eastern Europe, and Russia. She balances her art with a 29-year career in direct mail marketing, specializing in dental and veterinary promotion. In fact, a few of her mixed-media works incorporate pieces of dental study models. Tover paints in her studio in the Historic Benicia Arsenal artist community. "My artwork is a process of inner discovery through an exploration of texture, form, color and light. I have always had a particular interest in building layers - their tactile surfaces suggest infinite possibilities. Living in Northern California, I also am conscious of the play of light. Natural in appearance, with an underlying strength, my textural pieces contain actual found objects, which I have adhered to canvas, and then washed over with thin coats of luminescent acrylic. Texture and form are seen through veils of color. Pieces of metal, punched-out grills, lacy cutouts, old shingles and artifacts all find a place in my work. Recycled materials are reborn! Rethinking - and reusing-- items that have had another purpose fascinates me. I also try to achieve a shimmery, weathered appearance on the exposed surfaces, adding another dimension to the patterned essence of the piece. Viewing my work invites a visual journey and new discoveries. My works are linked naturally by the use of materials that express multidimensional meanings with environmental aspects." The Divas, painted in acrylic, have one characteristic in common--they all are women with attitude. Displaying a fierce boldness with an undercurrent of intrigue that often turns introspective, they cannot be overlooked, or ignored. The Divas are in our face and we, as viewers have to confront them. Once seen, these images are hard to forget, perpetuating the ultimate diva feminine mystique. Toby Tover, influenced by ever-changing images around her in current and vintage media (as well as her always-handy camera), uses her skillful painterly techniques and true understanding of her subjects' psychology to create these evocative, iconic pieces. "I paint subjects to elicit an emotional response from the viewer", stated the artist. Toby captures her Divas in a moment and ensures this moment has become timeless. ********************************************** Contra Costa Times Thursday, July 9, 2009: Touching a different area of their brains By Janice De Jesus Posted: 07/08/2009 10:19:34 AM PDT As a local resident and artist, Toby Tover longed to put her artistic skills toward a good cause. Being very familiar with the programs at the Contra Costa Jewish Community Center, one particular program � the Millman Adult Day Program � piqued her interest. It is a full-service program serving the needs of caregivers and individuals facing the challenges of memory impairment due to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, stroke and related dementia disorders. "I thought I needed to start giving back and thought I could do an art program for people with dementia and who've had a stroke," said Tover, an award-winning painter whose work has been featured in San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles galleries. Last November, the Pleasant Hill artist began volunteering to teach clients how to create art at the adult day program. Since then, the adult students have been creating amazing work ever since, she said. Her students' work will be featured in an artists' reception from 5-7 p.m. July 23 at the Friedkin Art Gallery at the community center where Tover's paintings on display through Aug. 28. A percentage of sales from the paintings will benefit the Millman Adult Day Program. "In just the one week, we have received so much positive feedback about her work," Judith L. Markowitz, director of Jewish Life Programs at the community center, said of the exhibit. Tover said her work with her clients has been very "hands on." "Before I came, they were given pages from a coloring book," said Tover, whose own acrylic and mixed-media paintings depict images of the human condition. "When I got here, they got blank sheets of paper. How intimidating is that?" Tover said she wanted to see what the students would do with blank sheets staring right back at them. What emerged from those blank sheets amazed her. "We started out with crayons and then used markers," she said. "I saw, over the next few months, that there were extremely talented people in the class. This has been a learning process for me, too." She once brought some Play-Doh to class to test their sculpting skills. "Each person got to work on different colors," she said. "You wouldn't believe the things they created. They were totally intuitive." Tover also shared her collection of art books with the class. "They need to be stimulated to see what abstract art looks like because it doesn't have to look like anything." Considering her clients' short-term memory issues, Tover-Krein said she introduces exercises which she believes to be mentally stimulating. "I show them pictures or bring my own work and I explain how I work and they're thinking, 'I can do that.' By having a visual stimulus, I'm touching a different area of their brain." The artist also plays music as her students work. "Music works in conjunction with the creating of art," said Tover. "It's soothing and mellows people out." Since several of paintings are inspired by vintage photographs or images from the past, such as women under old hair dryers at a beauty salon, women in vintage bathing suits and a gentleman standing next to an old automobile, Tover said her clients can place themselves in those scenarios as the images may trigger fond memories. "Art is a way to express themselves," she said of her students. "Some of them didn't know they were talented. Can you imagine what working with them does for me? It makes me feel I'm doing something good for the world." "The Artwork of Toby Tover" WHEN: Exhibit through Aug. 28; artist's reception and Millman Adult Day Program benefit, 5-7 p.m. July 23. WHERE: Friedkin Art Gallery, Contra Costa Jewish Community Center, 2071 Tice Valley Blvd., Walnut Creek INFORMATION: Free and open to the public. Call 925-938-7800. Visit www.ccjcc.org/gallery ********************************************** Realist Painter Toby Tover-Krein By DeWitt Cheng When abstract expressionism replaced figurative painting in the late 1940s, the critic Harold Rosenberg explained the radical esthetic change thus: �What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event ... it was decided 'just to paint.�� To be jettisoned in the bright new postwar world were the stuff of the past�figures, stories, and illusionistic space�that were now associated with social realism, European tradition, and Depression hard times. Painting�s meaning, now redefined as the liberated artist�s psychic state, would be transmitted directly to viewers without tedious intermediary stories and symbols. That purist impulse lasted a generation. Today, with all art taboos gone, the old figurationist/abstractionist war that once destroyed friendships seems quaint and dated. Gerhard Richter, for example, famously pursues entirely separate painting styles, while others combine figuration and abstraction in various blends, interchangeably. It is no act of esthetic treason, then, that Benicia realist painter Toby Tover-Krein should have donned Jackson Pollock�s paint-spattered shoes (figuratively speaking) for a new body of abstract work. Her show, curated by Arts Benicia,www.artsbenicia.org, is on view at Olson, www.olsonrealtyinc.org Realty until December 17 (with a reception December 3, 6-9pm). recylced matter Recycled Matter Mixed media on canvas Tover-Krein, who describes her previous work as "human/social condition narratives," explores the freedoms granted by abstraction� expressive mark-making unconstrained by the dictates of illusionism�with the discipline of an artist trained in figuration, like the artists of the postwar period who came of age during the thirties. The jagged yellow, blue and green squiggles of oil pastel floating atop a modulated white field of acrylic in �Almost� suggest sun-drenched landscape without depicting it, in the vein of gestural painters like Willem DeKooning and Joan Mitchell. More lyrical is �Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road,� with its billowing, buoyant, vaporous forms in pale yellows, beiges and pinks �a synthesis of Arshile Gorky and Helen Frankenthaler, Oz�s living flowers replacing monochromatic, tornado-tossed Dust Bowl Kansas. Less retrospective in feeling are works that play with polyptych formats, looser, more uncontrolled and eccentric mark-making, and a cave-painting palette of gold-ocher, red-brown, beige, umber-gray and white. Tover-Krein�s six �Enigma� paintings are presented in groupings of two or four (presumably due to space constraints); the multi-panel format adds thematic richness, implying narrative sequence (cartoon panels, film strips) and symbolism (mirrors, windows). These works also show the artist moving toward impulse and improvisation, away from depiction, her unconscious creating eccentrically-shaped organic growths, alternately craggy and aqueous, embedded within geological matrices. In �Enigma Nos. 5 & 6,� a crescent of ocher hovers above a field of mottled white rivulets and runnels suggesting stalactites. �Enigma Nos. 1, 2, 3 & 4� is presumably hung above the previous two paintings, although the quartet seems to form an integrated whole, with the shapes lining up at the edges, that is depleted rather than enhanced by the addition of the other pair, which seem unrelated except in their shared palette (if viewing adjacent jpegs onscreen on a computer is a trustworthy method of evaluation). In �Frazzled,� Tover-Krein adds handwritten words�e.g., �Call your mother��that suggest the punning glossolalia or diaristic internal monologues, respectively, of William T. Wiley or Squeak Carnwath. Rounding out the show are a couple of assemblages that embrace the current recessionary scavenging esthetic and employ �materials that express multidimensional meanings with environmental aspects.� �Bordeaux� is a square-format cardboard/mixed-media collage that suggests, with its subdued palette and toppled fragmentary forms, archaeological ruins. �Recycled Matter� employs shards of torn cardboard also, but its vivacious forms and color suggest cartography instead, geopolitical entities in slow sedimentary drift�not a bad metaphor for these challenging and politically paralyzed times. Olson Realty welcomes visitors to their gallery space � just drop by. This article appears in the October 2010 issue of Benicia Magazine |