Mark Tobey | the artist

Biography and work

Mine are the Orient, the Occident, science, religion, cities, space, and writing a picture.

9 Works

In his work, Tobey focused on man, nature, God, unity and equilibrium. He used space as a theme as well as an illusion of painting. It represented the place we live everyday, the blanket of atmosphere surrounding the Earth, and the “inner space” conceived by the mind. Tobey reacted against the post-Cubistic ideas of his time of depicting a recognizable image within a definable space and instead advocated the integration of object and space in a “unified field image.” Tobey is famous for his white writing paintings which cover the surface of an abstract field of color made up of thousands of brushstrokes…

After studying calligraphy in China and Japan, Tobey developed a technique of painting with rapid brushstokes, which he called ‘white writing’…