Mark Tobey

In 1923, Tobey met Teng Kuei, a Chinese painter and student at the University of Washington, who introduced Tobey to Eastern penmanship, beginning Tobey’s exploration of Chinese calligraphy.

In 1934, Tobey and Leach traveled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company. Leach went on to Japan, while Tobey remained to visit Teng Kuei, his old friend from Seattle, before going on to Japan. Japanese authorities confiscated and destroyed an edition of 31 drawings on wet paper that Tobey had brought with him from England to be published in Japan. No explanation for their destruction has been recorded; possibly they considered his sketches of nude men pornographic

Helmi Juvonen, another Northwest School artist, was obsessed with Tobey. She was diagnosed as a manic depressive, and suffered the delusion that she and Tobey were man and wife, a point of misinformation which she shared with almost anyone.
Tobey's friend Elizabeth Bayley Willis showed Tobey's painting Bars and Flails to Jackson Pollock in 1944. Pollock studied the painting closely and then painted Blue Poles, a painting that made history when the Australian government bought it for $2 million. Pollock's biographers write: "...[Tobey's] dense web of white strokes, as elegant as Oriental calligraphy, impressed Jackson so much that in a letter to Louis Bunce he described Tobey, a West Coast artist, as an 'exception' to the rule that New York was 'the only real place in America where painting (in the real sense) can come thru'" (Jackson Pollock).[8] Jackson Pollock went to all of Mark Tobey's Willard Gallery shows in New York. Here, Tobey presented small to medium sized canvases, approximately 33 by 45 inches. Jackson Pollock would see them and go home and blow them up to twelve by nine feet, pouring paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it on. Pollock was never really concerned with diffused light. But he was very interested in Tobey's idea of covering the entire canvas with marks up to and including its edges. This had never been done before in American art.[9]

Tobey is most famous for his creation of so-called "white writing" - an overlay of white or light-colored calligraphic symbols on an abstract field which is often itself composed of thousands of small and interwoven brush strokes. This method, in turn, gave rise to the type of "all-over" painting style made most famous by Jackson Pollock, another American painter to whom Tobey is often compared. [10]

Tobey’s work is also defined as creating a vibratory space with the multiple degrees of mobility obtained by the Brownian movement of a light brush on a bottom with the dense tonalities. The series of “Broadway” realized at that time has a historical value of reference today. It precedes a new dimension of the pictorial vision, that of contemplation in the action.

His work is inspired by a personal belief system that suggests Oriental influences and reference to Tobey's involvement in the Bahá'í Faith. Four of Tobey's signed lithographs hang in the reception hall in the Seat of the Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing institution of the Baha’i Faith.

Mark George Tobey (December 11, 1890 – April 24, 1976) was an American abstract expressionist painter, born in Centerville, Wisconsin. Widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most noted among the "mystical painters of the Northwest." Senior in age and experience, Tobey had a strong influence on the others. Friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School.[