Tommy May is the founder of Blue Door Gallery. After years in his Hollywood Hills home, the gallery now lives in the front room of a Boerum Hill brownstone, where he lives with his partner, painter Gwen O’Neil, and their sweet golden retriever Hampton. While Tommy’s focus is on Blue Door’s programming, he’s also an artist himself – his first medium was photography, which he studied at SCAD, before turning to painting.

When I stopped by the new space, Tommy had a story for nearly everything he’s collected on the shelves, windowsills, and walls. His archives are filled with negatives, silver gelatin prints, the film cameras he’s gathered since childhood, postcards and exhibition ephemera his mom collected while working in the art world, stacks of art books, and shells and rocks from the beach.

Resonance, a group show featuring works by Imogen Allen, Nathan Dilworth, Élise Lafontaine, Jessica Cannon, and Elana Bowsher, opens this Saturday, November 8th, at Blue Door Gallery.

From Tommy –

I. a book collection

My collection of books ranges from photography, painting, poetry and Roman Architecture. Growing up with certain learning disabilities, I was always drawn to the image because I had trouble with words. Some of these architectural books have fallen apart over the years and I have used the fallen pages and some photographs of my 1957 VW beetle when the former father and son owner did a full restoration together to create collages.

They’re inspired by the photographic surreal work of Jerry Uelsmann.

As a young photographer in school I found great inspiration in Sally Mann’s work, not so much for the subject matter, which I do love and respect, but as a student working to figure out my technical voice, I found her to be an exceptionally skilled photographer.

I bought this Robert Motherwell book from Harpers Books in East Hampton on one of my first visits there. I wasn’t a fan of this particular body of work by Motherwell but found how he documented each painting with a chair next to it so particular. I could never figure out if it was just a matrix to provide context for the scale of the works or something more deep and poetic.

Brice Marden is my favorite painter. His engagement with the environment and natural forces surrounding has been a pillar to my ethos as an artist and the work I choose to show at Blue Door Gallery. If you look at the work we show, everyone has a strong relationship with the environment. In this body of work called the Terre Verte, Brice made works that study the color Terre Verte or “Green Earth”. Across the works, he used green earth paint by ten different brands, which are all drastically different in hue although categorically the “Same”.

II. a room at The Tate

One of my favorite rooms of all museums is the room full of unfinished Turner works shown alongside Rothko at The Tate Britain. These paintings were of great appeal to Rothko and in 1969 he sent works to the Tate in hopes they would be displayed alongside the unfinished Turners.

III. a series of paintings

These five paintings have captivated my thoughts for most of my life: The Course of Empire – The Savage State; The Arcadian or Pastoral State; The Consummation of Empire; Destruction; and Desolation.

It is a five paneled work that takes the viewer through the rise and fall of an empire. Although I love them all, I have specifically been obsessed with the final panel in the work “Desolation”. In the painting, Humans have destroyed what they have created, after destroying the natural landscape. The empire is in ruins, structures crippling with vines and other plants taking mold over them and regaining control of the land. A Heron has made a nest at the top of a broken column in the foreground. The moon is rising with its reflection in the water below. It is one of the best depictions of nature’s resilience I can think of.

IV. a painting (or two)