Tony Sobota has spent much of the last decade observing Nashville’s rapidly changing urban landscape, forming his interests into an ongoing series of observational drawings and architecturally abstracted paintings. Early on, this Art of Construction series won him first place as a part of the Nashville Arts and Business Council’s Periscope program for rising artists. Among his several grant awards include his Little Kurdistan Community Mural, completed in 2019 and featured on NPR. Most recently he was awarded a large scale commission to celebrate The First Ten Years of the Music CIty Center’s success. His corporate collections also include Verizon, Meta, Metro Nashville, Graduate Hotels, and the Nashville Soccer Club. Tony invites you to follow along with his work and process on Instagram at @tonysobota.

My work takes various forms including observational painting, structured grids, free-form improvisations, word painting, or a combination. These bodies of work can differ quite a bit, but l often come back to the discovery of harmonious color relationships as the primary organizing element of my paintings. I'm after a feeling, and these specific arrangements are "enough" — they do it for me. With commissions the stakes seem higher: specific buildings or accurate likenesses of people become prioritized. While important, the 'subject matter' of a picture must serve the whole. If the arrangement of shapes and colors on a picture don't provide a rich visual experience for the viewer, it's dead. I'm after painting that's alive, or joyful, even if that means I have to scratch my original idea of what it might have been.