Tonya Henderson Rollyson's paintings show a predilection for swirling circular forms in deep, saturated tones. It's as though she's rendered some celestial stream's roaring currents in splashing reds and deep blues, flowing through her abstract compositions. Raised in a family of artists in Michigan, her pointillist forms echo her mothers family's long sewing and textile tradition, while many structural elements in her compositions echo her father's painting and woodworking. This multiplicity of skills is reflected in Tonya's own oeuvre, which appears all over the United States in innumerable forms: television graphics, greeting cards, commercials and murals, to name just a few.

Her paintings, however, dramatize a vital energy that appears constantly trying to escape the boundaries of the medium. Tonya moves seamlessly between surrealism and abstract expressionism, creating dynamic juxtapositions of colors, planes and shapes that alternately leap off the canvas or roll unstoppably out of the frame. From these grand movements to the details of their component parts, Tonya visualizes the grand minutiae of bounding energy.