George Dombek Tulsa Catalog

GEORGE DOMBEK

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Cover: Oklahoma Barn with Truck, 2024, Watercolor, 30” x 30”

Tulsa, Oklahoma

G EO R G E D O M B E K Oklahoma Barns Bicycles

Butterflies Birds

Reception: October 24 5pm-7pm Oct 24, 2024 to Dec 12, 2024

Chouteau Elevator Co., 2024, Watercolor, 40” x 30”

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Bicycles & Oklahoma Barn Paintings George Dombek clearly is one of this country’s great artistic talents.” His unique vision and ability to bring life to a favored subject is the essence of his genius. Few artists are able to explore themes with such intensity and even fewer are able to capture the beauty in a bicycle in the sunshine or the abstraction inherent in his barn structures.

Dombek’s enormous success as a painter is readily understood. From his ability to manipulate negative space and observe the power of linear structures in the barn subject to his ability to handle with a flare the overlapping cycle imagery. His ability to balance shadow and physical structure recalls the formal interplay which made the works of Cezanne so meaningful. But even more so, the tribute paid to the Constructivists in these works is important to note. George Dombek is aware of art history and his place in it. Although his work deals with issues of representational art, his focus on geometry and critical placement of visual elements, reveal him as a Formalist, more interested in the purely visual and less upon the conceptual.

Association with the tenets of Modernism aside, Dombek’s paintings appeal on a visceral level.

The cycle subjects carry us back to our youth and summer afternoons peddling in the bright sunlight. The barn imagery speaks to us of rural cultures past, long before technology and the destructive passage of time would leave these once beautiful and functional buildings to be reclaimed by nature’s power.

Dr. Louis A. Zona

Yellow Bike with Leather Seat, 2020, Watercolor, 22” x 30”

Executive Director The Butler Institute of American Art

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Oklahoma Historic 66, 2024, Watercolor, 30” x 30”

Adair County Barn with Windmill, 2024, Watercolor, 22” x 30”

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U-Turn, 2020, Watercolor, 40” x 40”

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Yellow Trike, 2022, Watercolor, 20” x 20”

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Barn with Sinclair Sign, 2024, Watercolor, 20” x 20”

Delaware County Barn, 2024, Watercolor, 20” x 40”

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Barn Near Jay, OK, 2024, Watercolor, 22” x 30”

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Adair County Barn, 2024, Watercolor, 20” x 20”

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Bird & Butterfly Paintings

gifted architect, got a degree from architecture school, and taught architecture for many years. Architects build up a design in a very rigorous way, starting with a grand plan and then devoting a lot of careful attention to every part. Every room presents a new architectural challenge. In addition, while architects generally start with some constraints, they’re generally not copyists but are designing creatively at every step. They’re inventing rather than just copying what they see.

Are They Really Watercolors?

Just about anyone can see that George Dombek’s paintings are remarkable, though most people would probably not be able to describe this in art historical terms, or to explain why this is the case. George’s mastery of watercolor, in fact, entails a willingness to disregard the usual rules of the medium. Indeed, his effects are so unusual that a number of professional painters, on first encountering his paintings, have insisted that he didn’t create them with watercolor, although in fact he quite obviously did.

George’s early watercolors, of crates, fire escapes, tobacco barns, and industrial buildings, often had a kinship with architectural renderings, and were constructed with rigorous attention to the laws of perspective. They then explored how the interplay of light and shade could create a further level of abstraction, creating dazzle patterns that break up the form in a way which is at once a bit confusing, a bit abstract, and at the same time intensely realistic. The game of interpreting what these paintings represent is not unlike the game of visually making sense of the world around us, which ranges from dazzling to obscurely dark. What’s curious is the way in which as George’s career has progressed, his work has become at once more “realistic” and at the same time more surreal and “abstract.” His paintings of river stones, for example, are marvels of intense realism, but at the same time are quite similar to abstract expressionist paintings in their play of color and brushwork and abstract patterns.

His watercolors are quite unlike what’s been done in watercolor before. And this has been an evolving process. His work has continued to grow. To my way of thinking, his most recent watercolors are his best.

Artistic originality is often associated with a technical innovation of some sort, which almost by accident leads to a new way of thinking about things, as well as by a willingness to break the rules. This is the case with George’s work, which brings the medium of watercolor into territory seldom if ever explored before.

At the turn of the century figures like John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer brought great freedom to the practice of watercolor, and over the course of time their approach became codified by figures like Eliot O’Hara in a fashion that became increasingly constraining and academic. The central concept was that watercolor should be spontaneous, in a way that contrasted with the stiff and photographic look of academic painting, and this in turn led to other precepts: that is should be done in a dash, that one should avoid layering and the use of opaque pigments, that the whites should be indicated with white paper rather than with pigment. And this led to a profusion of work by amateur Sunday painters, which was technically and emotionally facile.

way. When we look at the actual world, only one plane of depth is in sharp focus, and everything else is more blurred. But George paints each sector in sharp focus, as if we were scrutinizing it from a few inches away. Most people probably don’t consciously take in this fact, but it accounts for the quality of super-reality that George’s paintings convey. Not reality but super-reality. To immerse ourselves in his paintings is to enter a mysterious zone, in which new approaches to design and technique lead us into a world that hasn’t been explored before. And when we step back out into the “real world” again, we see it differently.

His recent paintings of butterflies, for example, achieve their glowing color through a [layering of paint], and I must confess that I still haven’t figured out how George creates water drops on a blade of grass that shimmer like a prism.

George himself produced some watercolors in a variation of this approach, which were essentially brush drawings in watercolor, modeled on the work of Van Gogh. But quite early in his career he began to turn the usual rules of watercolor inside out. In this regard, it’s significant that George is a very 14

Two Blue Birds, 2023, Watercolor, 16” x 16”

For all their “realism,” George’s painting are based on skillfully organized abstract patterns, and he draws out these big, bold shapes in an interesting In the Moment, 2024, Watercolor, 60” x 18”

Dr. Henry Adams Professor of American Art Case Western Reserve University 15

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Twenty-Six Insects: Hercules Beetle, 2024, Watercolor, 20” x 20”

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Four Butterflies: Big Greasy Butterfly, 2024, Watercolor, 16” x 16”

GEORGE DOMBEK Education M.F.A., Painting, University of Arkansas B.ARCH, Design, University of Arkansas Permanent Collections Acxiom Corporation, Conway, Arkansas Aerojet General, La Jolla, California Alltel Corporation, Little Rock, Arkansas Anstaff Bank, Berryville, Arkansas Anstaff Bank, Huntsville, Arkansas Arab Heritage Gallery, Al-Khobar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, Arkansas Arkansas Childrens Hospital, Little Rock, Arkansas Arkansas Childrens Hospital, Springdale, Arkansas Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Little Rock, Arkansas The Artery Association, Bethesda, Maryland Arts and Science Center, Pine Bluff, Arkansas Bank of Commerce, Tulsa, Oklahoma Barnett Bank, Jacksonville and Tampa, Florida Beaumont Art League, Beaumont, Texas Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama Blessings, Fayetteville, Arkansas W. C. Bradley Company, Columbus, Georgia Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, New York City Hall, Tallahassee, Florida Crocker Bank, Los Angeles, California Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas Debevoise and Plimpton, Washington, D. C. Equity Life Assurance, New York, New York Fay Jones School of Architecture, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas Florida National Bank, Jacksonville, Florida Fort Smith Art Center, Fort Smith, Arkansas Golden Artist Colors, New Berlin, New York Hallmark Card Corporation, Kansas City, Missouri

Henderson State University, Arkadelphia, Arkansas Historic Arkansas Museum, Little Rock, Arkansas Hyatt Regency, Chicago, Illinois IBM Corporation, Charlotte, North Carolina Kaplan, McLaughlin, Diaz, San Francisco, California Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Little Rock, Arkansas Louisiana College, Alexandria, Louisiana McDonalds Corporation, Chicago, Illinois Meadows Museum of Art, Shreveport, Louisiana Mercy Hospital & Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois Metro-Dade Center, Miami, Florida M. Graham & Company, West Linn, Oregon Mobile Oil, Houston, Texas Morgan Stanley, Dean Whitter, Little Rock, Arkansas Murphy Oil Corporation, El Dorado, Arkansas Nantucket Industries, New York, New York NexJet Corporation, Long Beach, California Northwest Arkansas Community College, Bentonville, Arkansas Northwest Mutual Life, Milwaukee, Wisconsin NuVell GMAC, Little Rock, Arkansas Parthenon Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee Presqu’ile Winery, Santa Maria, California The Preacher’s Son, Bentonville, Arkansas Royal Commission, Jubail, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia School of the Ozarks, Point Lookout, Missouri Southern Bell Corporation, Miami, Florida Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri Stephens, Inc., Fayetteville, Arkansas Stephens, Inc., Little Rock, Arkansas Sun Bank, Jacksonville, Florida 3M, St. Paul, Minnesota Tyson Foods, Inc., Springdale, Arkansas University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas University of Arkansas Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas W. C. Bradley Company, Columbus, Georgia Western Electric, New York, New York William F Laman Public Library, North Little Rock, Arkansas 3M, St. Paul, Minnesota

Solo Exhibitions

1990

2024 2022 2021

1988

2020 2019 2018 2017 2014 2009 2008 2006 2005 2004

2003 2000 1999 1997 1996 1995

1994 1993 1992 1991

Exhibit Art Gallery, Tulsa, Oklahoma David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee Friesen Gallery, Sun Valley, Idaho Blessings, Fayetteville, Arkansas David Lusk Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee David Lusk Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee Argenta Gallery, North Little Rock, Arkansas Greg Thompson Fine Art, Little Rock, Arkansas Blessings, Fayetteville, Arkansas Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, New York City, New York Argenta Art Gallery, Little Rock, Arkansas Bresler Eitel Art Gallery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas (sculpture installation) Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio Argenta Art Gallery, Little Rock, Arkansas Tyson Foods Corporate Headquarters, Springdale, Arkansas Taylors’ Contemporanea Fine Arts, Hot Springs, Arkansas Arts and Science Center, Pine Bluff, Arkansas Bell Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee Indigo Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida Palmer Gallery, Hot Springs, Arkansas University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas M. A. Duran Gallery, Tulsa, Oklahoma University of Central Arkansas, Conway, Arkansas Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, Arkansas Nan Miller Gallery, Rochester, New York Leslie Levy Fine Arts, Scottsdale, Arizona Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1987 1986 1985

1984 1983 1982 1981 1979

1978

1977

Florida A & M University, Tallahassee, Florida 621 Gallery, Tallahassee, Florida Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio Florida A & M University, Tallahassee, Florida O. K. South Works of Art, Miami, Florida Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia Lemoyne Center for Visual Arts, Tallahassee, Florida Florida Center for Contemporary Art, Tampa, Florida Gallery Contemporenea, Jacksonville, Florida Florida A & M University, Tallahassee, Florida The Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia The University of Tampa, Tampa, Florida Four Arts Center, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Tallahassee, Florida Arab Heritage Gallery, Al-Khobar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Capricorn Galleries, Bethesda, Maryland Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, California Texas Technical University, Lubbock, Texas Massillon Museum, Massillon, Ohio San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California American Institute of Architects, San Francisco, California Greater Birmingham Arts Alliance, Birmingham, Alabama Chautauqua Art Galleries, Chautauqua, New York William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, California University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas

Back Cover: Twenty Butterflies: Silvery Checkerspot, 2024, Watercolor, 30” x 30”