Truth and Beauty Explores Minimalist Artist Tom Dowling

A documentary short on the art and artistic process of Tom Dowling screens Friday during the Orange County Art Faculty Invitational reception at a venue that is itself a piece of art, Coastline Community College in Newport Beach.

Dowling, who like his wife Lisa is a longtime Orange Coast College art instructor, uses “minimalism” to describe his art, although “my preferred term would be reductive painting: a bare-boned formal approach to image making,” he writes on his website, tomdowling.com.

“I have a formally reductive sensibility that (in over 30 years of painting) has developed into a language of my own.”

Bradford Salamon and Stan Yan's 30-minute documentary Truth and Beauty explores Dowling's work with assists by Oakland-based artist Tony DeLap, San Pedro abstract resin artist Eric Johnson, Ontario abstract artist (and UCI grad) Jan Taylor and Cal State Fullerton Nicholas and Lee Begovich Gallery Director Mike McGee.

The Orange County Art Faculty Invitational reception runs from 5-8 p.m. Friday—with the film rolling at 7 p.m.—in Coastline's Visual and Performing Arts Department at 1515 Monrovia Ave., Newport Beach.

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