About the Artist
I began painting scenes from the New Jersey shore when I was twelve, studying with Yvonne Aubert. Sharlene and Larry Christensen helped me initially interpret the Utah landscape, which I have enjoyed since I moved to Salt Lake City in 1972. I met my future wife, Kate, that year as well, and she has been my traveling companion and source of inspiration during the last 35 years. I studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, the San Francisco Academy of Art, and the University of Utah. I have a degree in "Hard-edged light fills the rhythmic landscape of the Great Basin Desert. Cloud shadows race across basins. Winter snow melts quickly under big skies. Alkali dust and the floating mirages of island-mountains blur these sharp edges on hot summer days. The gray-green of desert shrubs and the blue surprise of springs and marshes add color and life to the geography of rock and sun.
Sean Toomey understands this landscape better than any painter I know. He decodes its subtle vitality. His watercolors capture the contrasts of wetland and desert, storm light and starkness. This is a horizontal land, and so he paints only horizontal watercolors true to the place. His bands of color capture the quixotic light, the concentric circles of ecological communities, and the serenity of the desert. He understands the drama and tension that dwell at the boundary between lake and salt-pan, basin and range. And he knows that these tensions lead to a kind of crazy joy—colors that you can never take for granted, beauty that seems both fierce and private when you come upon it sixty miles from pavement, alone.
The hidden landscapes of Utah’s West Desert have found their artistic advocate in Sean Toomey."
-Stephen Trimble, author/photographer of The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin