Eliza K Thomas    
     
 

Please contact the artist about smaller artworks on paper.

Art Lessons - Please contact the artist about private art lessons for children and adults.

Email:
info@elizakthomas.com

Studio is open by appointment

Gallery representation:

Wally Workman Gallery
1202 West 6th Street
Austin, Texas 78703
512.472.7428
http://www.wallyworkmangallery.com

 

 

EDUCATION
2003-2009 Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Snowmass, CO.
2008 School of Visual Arts, Continuing Education Division. New Lebanon, NY.
1996 B.A. in Italian, Columbia University; Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude. New York, NY.
1992 Parsons School of Design. New York, NY.

 

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009 "The Drip and The Line", Tocquigny. Austin, TX.
2009 "Anticipation: The Promise of Spring", McDermott Gallery, Austin, TX.
2009 "Dichotomy of Surface and Image", Jewish Community Association of Austin. Austin, TX.
2009 "Five x Seven", Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX.
2009 East Austin Studio Tour, Austin, TX.
2008 "Chase Underground", Chase Tower, Austin, TX
2008 "Five x Seven", Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin, TX.
2008 "Texas Hall of Fame Film Awards", Benefit for Austin Film Society, Austin, TX.
2007 "Postcards From The Edge", Visual AIDS, New York City, NY.
2007 "White Buffalo Project", Quattro Gallery, Austin, TX.
2007 "Red Hot Red Dot" , Women and Their Work, Austin, TX.
2007 Austin Art Start Studio Tour, Austin, TX.
2007 "Super Summer Group Show", Grand Contemporary, Lafayette, LA.
2006 "Red Hot Red Dot", Women and Their Work, Austin, TX.
2006 "RED", Wally Workman Gallery, Austin, TX.
2006 Two person show with Honora Jacob, Wally Workman Gallery, Austin, TX.
 

 

 

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2010 "Many Roads Taken: Paintings by Eliza K. Thomas", 2ND FLR Gallery. Chicago, IL.
2009 "Love Poems to the Vegetable", Jeffrey’s Restaurant, Austin, TX.
2009 "New Works on Paper", Kick Pleat, Austin, TX.

 

COLLECTIONS
The University of Texas School of Law, Austin, TX.
Houston's Restaurant, Austin, TX.
Becky Beaver
Luci Baines Johnson

 

RESIDENCIES
2008 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.
2007 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.
2005 Six month painting residency, Provence, France.

 


Statement of Artistic Concerns

Besides being born with a gypsy soul and an intimate connection with nature, I was raised in a family of storytellers who considered travel to be a valuable part of a person's education. Thus from a young age I was exposed to other places and other cultures. The love of travel and global exploration has stayed with me, having become a part of my work. Painting is a journalistic response to life for me, and I set out to tell stories of different landscapes--of living things in those landscapes, of the feelings spots of time in those landscapes elicit--in the form of 'visual poems' or 'odes' to the natural world. And although my work is not blatantly political, it is the result of a sustained observation of the natural environment, a place whose beauty and value is threatened by our increasingly urban and industrialized culture. I feel tremendous compassion and awe when I look at that world and those feelings inevitably enter as subjects of my paintings. Therefore, I hope a viewer of my work experiences a more intimate connection with the natural world and that by personalizing this connection, they may experience the world at large in a more sensitive and thoughtful way.

I strive to create visual counterparts--at times abstract, at times figurative and representational--to the geography, ecology and atmosphere of the places I paint, and to explore and reveal the spiritual landscape that exists within the physical landscape.

I am inspired by gardens, my garden, deep woods, dusk, Japanese prints, calligraphy, cracks in roads and sidewalks, shadows, arching lines in space, bare branches against winter sky, sounds of wind, moments with flowers, poetry, music, fabrics and textiles, color and light, horizons, mystery of emotion, and beauty.

My studio practice involves searching and observing, waiting and receiving, and allowing intuition and chance to take part in the process by which a work comes to fruition. My process involves first absorbing the essence of a place, of a moment, of a living thing; and then allowing whatever I've received to distill its way down and re-emerge as visual imagery. The nature of the support determines the mark making, as I am interested in letting the media and the composition play off the material on which they are applied.

Emil Nolde, a German Expressionist painter who, when asked his intentions, replied: "To grasp what lies at the very heart and to transform Nature by infusing it with one's own mind and spirit."

 

All the Hemispheres

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You

 

By HAFIZ, 14th century Persia
Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

 

 


info@elizakthomas.com

All artwork and images © 2005-2010 Eliza Thomas