about the artist

Residing in Memphis, Tennessee with his silver Catahoula/Pitbull mix Sadie, Thomas is a visual artist, musician, and avid gardener with a passion for creating captivating cityscape works on canvas, colorful portrait paintings, and constantly working in multiple sized sketchbooks when he's not recording drums with his contemporary jazz outfit etta havoc. His paintings feature imagined and existing urban spaces existing in multiple dimensions with skewed perspectives, providing viewers with lost blueprints overlapping to create new worlds to explore.  Housepaint and charcoal are used to create large works on canvas to shape familiar architecture, layered atop each other, then lost to weathering and ultraviolet radiation exposure. Palettes of muted earth tones scattered with bright, colorful light sources make a patchwork of tones and shades akin to bruised skin and rotten fruit. Skeletal line drawings are laid down in chalk over existing skyline perspectives to create multiple depths of fields, topographical zones and horizon lines across the distant, haze-filled landscapes.  Each piece is painted with acrylic house paints, charcoal stick, and chalk pastel on hand-stretched canvas to reflect the same wood, nail and paint; construction materials, used to make the cities portrayed. Intended to provide more questions than answers, the works hold a vacancy for specific settings, locations and time. Each piece a unique view out a window into a nostalgic fever-dream of imagined worlds, discovered and buried on the canvas, telling an untellable story of the location's geography.  The exoskeletons of buildings, homes and public spaces rising up, swaying in the wind, and eventually falling to the next layer in the lithosphere.

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Thomas has been creating art since childhood and pursued a BFA with a concentration in drawing with an art history minor at Memphis College of Art, graduating in 2010.