Dear Subscriber:

It’s your last chance to see my exhibition at Meibohm Fine ArtsI see it's been a while since my last newsletter, so rather than writing more than anyone should be asked to read, I'll keep this short as possible, only mentioning here that I am working on projects that I can tell you about in future newsletters. And that I will post new paintings in the next few days, in case you are subscribed to those updates.

I mainly wanted to mention here that you might be surprised by a painting of mine in Erie Art Museum’s upcoming Spring Exhibition (March 15 – August 9).

Font, above, portrays no landscape, and that's probably not what you expected from me. This thickly layered painting (oil about an inch thick) on a wood panel depicts nothing, in fact.

Nonobjective paintings like this have been appearing in my studio for at least seven years. But this is only the second time I have decided to offer to show one outside my studio. Did I mention these before to you? Their story is here.

For the thread that connects these works to my landscapes, I have carried an insight front and center since my student days.

I think I heard or read it said by the proto-Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg that paintings are "facts" and not “pictures.” At that time, even some leading art writers were still calling them pictures, decades after New York’s Abstract Expressionists - and even earlier Modernists - had moved beyond picturing objects in their paintings. The arch representational surrealist painter Rene Magritte illuminated the problem in his famous painting The Treachery of Images (“This is not a pipe”).

Do you see the painting, or do you see through it to another thing or thought?

In all the years since then, I was able to focus on the fact I was making objects, facts, paintings: things to be seen in themselves. Maybe these nonobjective works are just purer "objects" then, with nothing to see through, to reference elsewhere.

Of course, most of my work uses the landscape as my subject - I "picture" it if you will. I am drawn to the rich variety and vitality of nature as if by awe alone. When painting landscapes, I feel I am simply responding to the central importance of our natural environment, a fact that escapes our notice too often because, well, we are human. Our minds are already filled with important clutter and pressing issues. Which reminds me. We have to get going here.

Thanks for your time, and for subscribing! See you again before so long.

-Thomas