I believe that each of us is given one sentence at birth, and we spend the rest of our life trying to read that sentence and make sense of it.
—
Li Young Lee
Tom Fairs by Bobbie Oliver
- Danny Lyon by Susan Meiselas
- Tom Murphy by Colm Tóibín
- Cass McCombs and Ariel Pink by Mónica de la Torre
- Brian Evenson by Blake Butler
- Wayne Koestenbaum by Kenneth Goldsmith
- John Newman and B. Wurtz
- Ralph Lemon by James Hannaham
- Eija-Liisa Ahtila by Cary Wolfe
Interviews
- Late and Soon, Getting and Spending: Prose Sonnets on Dailiness by Jessica Baran
- Seven Scenes from the Wreckage by Lynn Melnick
- Four Poems by Daniel Shapiro
- Excerpt from Sent by Joshua Cohen
- Don Ilario by Gabriella De Ferrari
- The Girl with the Matted Hair: Eight Scenes from Childhood by Carole Maso
- On the Water by Victoria Moon
- Tom Fairs by Bobbie Oliver
- Portfolio by Margaret Lee
First Proof
Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2000, pencil on paper, 8¾ x 6”. Images courtesy of the estate of Tom Fairs and Kerry Shuss, New York City.
Tom Fairs (1925–2007), a lifelong resident of London, left school at age 15 to become a messenger boy. After winning several prizes for drawing, he went on to graduate from Horsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Married to the writer Elizabeth Russell Taylor, he taught fine art and stage design at the Central School of Art and Design from 1954 to 1987. Upon retiring, he devoted himself entirely to his art, painting, and drawing every day. Much of his imagery was found in and around Hampstead Heath, where he drew daily in his sketchbooks. His artistic hero and mentor was Pierre Bonnard, whose delight in the ordinariness of daily life and its elevation to art was a shared passion. Like Bonnard, Fairs was a humble, unpretentious man, indifferent to the notion of career, for whom art, as he wrote in a statement in 2003, was a chance to have a “brief glimpse of the implicit order that lies beneath what we perceive as reality.”
—Bobbie Oliver, painter.
Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2002, pencil on paper, 5 ½ x 4 ½”.
Tom Fairs, Detail from Untitled , 2002, pencil on paper, 6 ¾ x 4 ¼”.
Tom Fairs, Roofs Hampstead, 2000, pencil on paper, 8 × 5.88”.
Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2004, pencil on paper, 5 ½ x 4 ¼ inches.
Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2002, pencil on paper, 5 ½ x 4.13”.
Related
Even more extraordinary than the putative subject of Linda Hattendorf’s debut documentary, an elderly homeless artist, is the fact that Hattendorf started aiming her camera at him long before September 11, 2001.
Originally published in
BOMB 120,
Summer 2012
Featuring interviews with Danny Lyon, Tom Murphy, Cass McCombs and Ariel Pink, Brian Evenson, John Newman and B. Wurtz, Ralph Lemon, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
