Lynn Tomaszewski (b. 1967) was Chair of Foundations at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design until 2014 when she became Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Her conceptually driven art often explores the relationship between perception and ideas. This new body of work features a series of luscious, visceral paintings. Tomaszewski is interested in the processes of accumulation, growth and learning: how marks build up and form patterns over time. From hives to swarms to various growth algorithms, relationships and social orders emerge. These paintings, created painstakingly from innumerable individual gestures, grow into active optical fields — shimmering, unstable, vibrating.

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Tomaszewski’s mark making follows sets of rules, such as “all paintings begin with a flat field of one or more colors.” Each drawing also begins with one circle. All subsequent circles need to touch all others. All circles are then filled intuitively with color. The goal, says Tomaszewski, is a painting where there is no hierarchy. All of the colors demand equal attention or there is a shifting hierarchy, where each time you look at the painting, a different color might dominate.

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When the paintings are complete, they become active visual fields, almost alive in their optic states. The process of viewing the paintings creates a sensory exchange of perception and data, a vitally energized and communicative engagement with the viewer. One stands in front of each painting and the dynamic of how we process and receive information, our limited human means of reception, becomes more apparent.

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Tomaszewski has said that: “Another concern in the work is how the legacy of minimalism can fuse with our image-laden, information-driven reality to articulate both the ‘little picture’ of the individual and the ‘big picture’ of the entire complex of life.”