Peachy, (figure) by Tom Prochaska
- Title: Peachy, (figure)
- Artist: Tom Prochaska
- Medium: Mixed Media
- Size: 14"h x 5"w
- Creation date: 2018
- Added to collection: 2020
- Donor: Gift of Mark Andres
- Campus: Rock Creek
- Location: B2/1 Hallway gallery vitrine
This sturdy and slightly wary figure seems to step out of time, evoking at once a primal lost world and the next door neighbor. Tom Prochaska's work has an uncanny ability to cut through artistic fashions to present the world of the human condition-- Shakespeare's "a bare forked animal" bearing the weight of a thousand daily tasks, cruelties and tendernesses.? ?
Though known as a painter and printmaker, artist Tom Prochaska took up making small figurines after health issues left him temporarily too fatigued to work in those media. He returned to a sculptural medium he remembered? from his childhood-- papier-maché, cloth, and pigment.? Many of the figures he made at this time referenced characters he remembered from the television variety programs of his childhood-- plate spinners, clowns, boxers, though this figure with raised shoulders and hands tensed at her side as if about to grasp invisible pistols, feet turned slightly inward, might be the survivor of a catastrophe or even apocalypse. The fragility of old newspapers belies the rock-hard resilience of this work.