Thomas Paquette – 2020 Brinton 101

A native of Minnesota now living in Pennsylvania, Thomas Paquette has worked full time as a painter since finishing graduate school in 1988. His BFA in Painting was earned from Bemidji State University, and MFA in Painting, on a full fellowship from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

He was the recipient of a three-year residency-fellowship in Miami Beach from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, and had other visiting and artist residencies at American Academy in Rome, Aegean Arts and Cultural Exchange, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Colony, and Acadia, Yosemite, and Rocky Mountain national parks.

He’s produced more than sixty solo exhibitions in museums and prominent galleries in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC, and elsewhere, and two of his solo exhibitions (On Nature’s Terms and America’s River Re-Explored: Paintings of the Mississippi from Source to Gulf) have each traveled to three art museums in the Midwest, the East, and the West. Other solo museum exhibitions were hosted at Erie Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, The Rockwell Museum, and Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

His paintings are in numerous private, corporate, museum and state collections, and have been featured in numerous publications. Commissioned works in public and corporate collections include large paintings for Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Queen Mary II, and the states of Minnesota, Montana, Maine. Almost forty of Paquette’s paintings were selected to hang at nineteen U.S. embassies on five continents (including in the cities of Rome, Brussels, Athens, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Taipei, and Santiago), and he has lectured at museums and universities in the U.S., as well as in Greece, Wales, and England.

Paquette’s paintings are currently shown by T. H. Brennen Fine Art in Scottsdale, AZ; EVOKE Contemporary in Santa Fe, NM; Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis, MN; and Meibohm Fine Arts in East Aurora, NY.

“On my only diversion from studying art in college and graduate school, I studied to be a naturalist. Nature continues to be both my subject and teacher. The imperceptible but massive grind of plate tectonics and the momentary whims of weather alike are mentors and guides as I build up and scrape off layers of color to get at something more vital and essential about my subject than a faithful rendering would accomplish. It doesn’t matter how much time this process takes. What I found so compelling in my subject, I retell to the viewer in paint, even if it takes several years of creation, destruction, and re-creation to best tell that story. It is only important that the painting evolves into a living talisman of the place that inspired it.” Thomas Paquette