Dowling Walsh Gallery

Thomas Paquette

Thomas Paquette is best known for the landscape paintings of America and Europe. He has exhibited throughout the eastern United States since the late 1980s.

Born in Minneapolis in 1958, Thomas Paquette was exposed early to the beauty and power of the landscape through extensive road travels with his family. This nurtured an even greater thirst for travel as an adult, and for ways to portray in painting poignant moments found in his geographical explorations.

Determined to be a painter since early childhood trips to the local art museum, Paquette has taken some detours toward his arrival as an artist. He dropped out of art school in his teens to follow his muse on long journeys of hopping freight trains and hitchhiking to such far-flung places as Alaska. Years later the artist decided to pursue again a formal education. Then considering his art something rather personal, he enrolled this time instead in pursuit of a degree in the study of nature. He entered as a student of "Environmental Studies" at a private college, but just a couple years later was thoroughly ensconced in the study of painting again. He went on to earn a bachelor's and then a master's degree in fine arts (BFA in painting from Bemidji State University and MFA from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville).

Within a few months of graduation from the master's program, he was awarded the prestigious Visual Arts fellowship/residency from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, a three-year paid artist residency in Miami Beach, Florida. Subsequently, he was also offered residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Bemis Foundation, and the Millay Colony, The American Academy in Rome, and with the USM/Aegean Cultural Exchange in Greece. Paquette has been commissioned several times to do public works.

His largest public work to date is "Tributary" for the State of Minnesota at the Central Lakes College - a thirty-two foot by seven and a half-foot canvas depicting a scene on the Mississippi. His one-man shows include museum shows at the Georgia Museum of Art, the Museum of Southern Illinois University; exhibitions at US Embassies in Vienna, St. Petersburg (Russia), Latvia, Chad, Santiago; and one-man shows in galleries in Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, Charlotte and other cities.

After the Florida fellowship ended in 1991, he moved to Portland, Maine for a decade to paint full time. He has since moved his permanent studio to Warren, PA, where he lives with his musician wife, painting full time still.

For inspiration, Paquette is an incorrigible traveler. He not only crisscrosses the continent of North America to paint, but frequents such places as the British Isles, Italy, the South of France, Greece and Turkey, painting usually small works on site.

Through his residencies and in other ways, Paquette has come to know several important living landscape painters personally, among them Neil Welliver and Wolf Kahn, from whom he draws camaraderie and inspiration. But his work seems most rooted in the romanticism of the second half of the 19th Century (George Inness, the Luminists, Caspar David Friedrich) as well as Fauve and French Impressionist influences.