Thomas Victor Downing (1928-1985)

An abstract painter whose specialty was manipulating saturated acrylic paint to experiment with various shapes and optical color contrasts, Thomas Victor Downing was part of the Washington Color Painters who exhibited together in 1965 at the Washington DC Gallery of Modern Art. Downing believed that color was the most important focus of a painting and that geometric forms, especially circles, were the most effective shapes to hold color onto a canvas. Many of his compositions were arranged small dots of pure color on unprimed canvas, and other works were monochromatic geometric shapes linked to letters of the alphabet.

Thomas Downing studied at Catholic University in the 1950s, wo...