Beneath his thick and sensuous painted renderings of flora and fauna, is a grappling with the giants of abstraction. In Newsom’s 2015 catalog of work from the past 10 years to the present exhibition, critic Barry Schwabsky writes in his essay, “what keeps ‘strong painting’ from becoming merely muscle bound – is Newsom’s secret weapon: the discipline that comes from considering himself, not a painter of images, but rather an abstractionist … to appreciate his paintings is … to engage with their surfaces of purely sensual incident.”