craig c thomas

Born: 1956
New Jersey, USA

Craig C. Thomas has been involved with art, and more specifically, the art of the landscape, for more than three-quarters of his life. He first began to show interest and talent in art in his earliest drawings around the age of seven. By age twelve he began his first explorations in painting using the acrylic medium. The subject matter of these early efforts was the landscape - usually the flat, broad landscapes that could be seen on family travels at the time, mostly through West Texas and New Mexico, and on into Colorado. Those first acrylic paintings, primitive as they were, revealed an affinity for capturing the large expanse of sky, which is an integral part of the Texas and the plains' experience.

Craig attended college at Texas Tech University in Lubbock and majored in Studio Art. There he studied painting under professors James Howze and Hugh Gibbons and developed his own style of hybrid landscapes - partly imaginary and partly real - inspired by the plains of West Texas though "windmills and sunsets were not allowed as subject matter." He began working in oils and watercolors during this time.

The years following graduation saw Craig living in Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Santa Fe and working back and forth between music and art. He is also a talented keyboardist and songwriter and played with several bands between 1979 and 1987, most notably The Fables, Bobby Frost & the Modern Poets, The Plan, and Texans Without Cattle. His oil paintings from this period became larger and were mostly abstract, often monochromatic color-fields; the watercolors veered the other way, becoming more visually dense and complex.

In 1986, Craig entered graduate school at the University of North Texas in Denton and majored in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Photography. There he studied under painters Henry Whiddon and conceptual artist Vernon Fisher. Gradually, under their tutelage and Craig's own work in black-and-white photography, the two divergent directions in his painting coalesced into new works that he termed photo-impressionism. To reach this point, he produced several paintings in only black and white and swung heavily in the direction of realism by working from photographs. He also incorporated use of the cold wax medium during this time, using it almost exclusively.

Eventually color reappeared in the paintings as well as representations of odd objects such as a burning book in a campfire, a hubcap, bowling balls, a boom box in a cemetery, a statue of Buddha by a road, and a red high-heeled shoe in a field of snow and rocks. They were landscapes all right, but of a different sort. Missing was representation of an obvious vista; the vista, that traditional element of all landscape painting over the years, had been suppressed in favor of other elements. To see work of this period click on the link or thumbnails to the left.

The landscapes took on a meaning of their own from the addition of whatever object was included into the foreground but just what the meaning was, wasn't always obvious or simple. The best and most representative pieces of this period were O Lazarus, the "boom box in the cemetery painting", and Untitled No. 3, which featured a partially snow-covered hillside with two construction stakes in the foreground. These new works were also very large, often more than six feet in one or both dimensions.

Craig continued to work in this vein into early 1992 at which time he fulfilled a lifelong dream by moving to Colorado and established Excellent Sky Gallery in Kittredge, a small town just west of Denver in the mountains. The paintings during this time became smaller and more focused on space and light within the landscape; the various odd objects disappeared.

After a six-and-a-half year hiatus, Craig returned to painting in late 2000 with Full Moon Night, Santa Fe - a night painting done from memory. In 2001, he began a new painting series entitled White, Blue and Gray, which features cloud formations and sky as its subject matter. In 2002 Excellent Sky Gallery became a virtual gallery online where viewers can browse through his old catalogue, see his new work, and commission work from him, and in 2004, Excellent Sky Gallery (& Empire Records) re-opened in the small mountain town of Empire, Colorado. His work can be found in private collections, both individual and corporate, in Texas, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma. Having taught for 2 1/2 years at North Texas in graduate school, he is available to teach individuals and workshops in oil painting and drawing and offers summer workshops through his gallery in Empire.