Thomas Paquette paints full-time and lives near the wilds of the Allegheny National Forest outside Warren, Pennsylvania. One of eleven children, he completed his formal art education with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting on a full graduate fellowship from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 1988. He earned his BFA degree in Painting at Bemidji State University in 1985, graduating summa cum laude.

Thomas was awarded a CAVA Residency-Fellowship for three winters in Miami from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts from 1989-91. Following that, he moved to Maine to paint the wilder lands there, and worked on some large public commissions listed below. In 2001 he relocated to the Victorian Allegheny River town of Warren, Pennsylvania, after marrying his artist wife Ellen.

Thomas draws inspiration from the natural world immediately surrounding him in the Allegheny National Forest, and just as frequently from more distant excursions. Hardly considering himself a plein air artist, he paints outdoors on-site only in preliminary stages. Even a tiny gouache painting begun outdoors is only finished after some reconsideration in his studio.

Among other public and private commissions that he was awarded are four seven-foot-high canvases for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis; a thirty-two-foot long canvas for Central Lakes College in Minnesota; an eleven-foot painting for the State Office Building in St. Paul; and paintings for the collection of the opulent Queen Mary 2 ocean liner.

Thomas was an artist in residence at several institutions, including the American Academy in Rome, the Millay Colony, McNamara Foundation, USM Aegean Arts and Cultural Exchange, and three National Parks. He presented lectures around Greece when his paintings were installed at the U.S. embassy in Athens in 2006, and at other times gave talks at the University of Wales in Cardiff, and at Plymouth College in Exeter, England, as well as a few colleges in the U.S.

The book Thomas Paquette: Gouaches was published in 2007 to accompany a traveling museum exhibition of his gouache paintings. More recently, On Nature's Terms: Paintings by Thomas Paquette commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, a solo exhibition inspired by wilderness areas all around the country, traveled throughout 2014 and 2015 to museums in California, Indiana and New York. A 40-page catalogue was produced for this show.

Paquette's solo exhibition in 2015 at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, NY, was the occasion for the eponymously titled 100-page catalogue Touching on Water: Paintings by Thomas Paquette.

His paintings have been featured in several dozen solo exhibitions at nationally prominent art galleries (in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Maine, Minneapolis, Washington, DC) and museums (Erie Art Museum; the Evansville Museum of Art, Science and History; Georgia Museum of Art; Hoyt Institute of Fine Art; the Regina A. Quick Center Art Museum; the Rockwell Museum; Westmoreland Museum of American Art; Wildling Art Museum). His works have been selected to hang in seventeen U.S. diplomatic facilities around the world, including embassies in Athens, Moscow, Rome, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Santiago, and Taipei.

--- To read an interview about the spirit of my work, please see Mary Soliwoda's interview with me. -- T.P.