|
I am a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live and work. My work consists of oil paintings done from life which record the landscapes and cityscapes around me. A student of the painter Richard Crozier who in turn studied under Wayne Thiebaud, I am fascinated with observing and recording the world around me, and I strive to make my paintings as immediate and truthful as possible. I am always looking for and finding new subjects wherever I go, and often return to the same places to study the effects of time and season. BIOGRAPHY: Edward Thomas is a self-taught artist from central Virginia. At an early age he started traveling, receiving exposure to art and architecture around the world. While studying architecture at the University of Virginia in the early nineties, Thomas met Richard Crozier, a professor at the University's art department and student of Wayne Thiebaud in the late 1960's. From Crozier Thomas received encouragement to continue his self-directed exploration of painting from direct observation. After receiving a degree in Architecture from Virginia in 1996, Thomas started supporting himself from sales of his oil paintings, commissions for architectural renderings, and mural work. He also continued to travel around the world, always with his easel. Gradually he has come to produce a steady body of work consisting of plein-air portraits of city life in Virginia, pure landscapes of the countryside surrounding Charlottesville and Richmond, and oil sketches done while traveling. He augments his income from these sales by painting commissioned house and estate portraiture, also done from life. Building on his rigorous architectural training, Thomas searches out the often overlooked and hidden structure of things, then uses a very rapid and loose approach to the application of paint to capture his subject and freeze a moment of time, relaying in frenetic globs of paint and a fully saturated palette a precise rendition of his subject. His plein-air paintings convey not only an instantaneous moment, accurate to the time of day, season, and atmosphere, but also more subtle hints of the passing of time and hidden history of a place. His larger studio paintings, each of which are based on numerous outdoor studies, tend to develop thick accretions of paint as he works and reworks the surface over and over, working on some over the course of several years. In addition to maintaining a studio in downtown Charlottesville, Edward Thomas manages Gallery-Neo.com, and has established a reputation for cultivating local self-taught and outsider artists. |
