Art Sync: Nature As Muse

Elizabeth Johnson: Your website bio mentions that you dropped out of your freshman BFA studies and traveled the country for six years. What did traveling touch that book learning did not?

Thomas Paquette: During my “hobo years," I went on several adventures by freight train and hitchhiking that lasted anywhere from a week to several months. But it wasn’t a full-time gig: I always gravitated toward further education. When I wasn’t enrolled in colleges (I attended five), I used public libraries to follow my own curriculum.

EJ: You seem to value surprise, and your paintings capture the anticipation of new vistas. Did making choices dominate hoboing? Does the idea of “the road not taken” affect your work now? (I am thinking of Robert Frost’s poem.)

TP: Ha! I always felt that hopping freight trains was a perfect apprenticeship for an artist. You risk your life with both. They take you to unexpected places, on a timeline you can’t predict. Book learning makes everything appear so knowable. Looking back at history, events seem inevitable.

TP: My most vivid landscape memories––a sunset near my house when I was three, a spectacular moment in the Yukon Territory when I was nineteen––weren’t painted, and I have no photos of them. Perhaps that is why I paint landscapes today: to reclaim those peak moments.  Subjects least manipulated and subjugated by humans attract me. I believe any spot or subject in the universe holds promise for painting. It just needs the spark of a curious mind, an engaged eye, and some fortitude.

EJ: In the video Art in Embassies: 3 Questions you mention sitting in the back of the family car "watching the mountains disappear"––a beautiful image. In painting, isn't moving away from something the same as moving toward it?

TP: Painting is not so different from writing, for instance. The goal is communication. Being effective requires borrowing someone else’s eyes, and pretending you are seeing the painting for the first time: “What do I see? What seems wrong? What is interesting, and what isn't? Who the heck made this mess of a painting?” I make a variety of studies sometimes to get to a new perspective. I take breaks facing away from the canvas until, as much as possible, I forget what I did and surprise myself in approaching the canvas. It all boils down to overcoming myopia.

EJ: You did several studies, Variations on Post Storm Light, that seem to be the chief influences for the painting Post Storm Light. Do you generally work from studies made on-site or use reference photos? Do you work differently when you are painting a large, multi-paneled commission?

TP: I don’t have a prescribed way to paint. Every painting holds its own destiny. I often make studies to discover potentials in a larger work. But often the studies are completed long after the large work is done. Painting different versions lets ideas talk among themselves, and often the little tough guys want the last word: “OK, that other painting is fine. But what if . . .?”

TP: I answered a call for applicants for the NFAA’s program in Art Calendar, a now-defunct magazine. I was rewarded well for scrambling to meet the deadline: three winters in Miami, just painting. The National Park System and NFAA have no connection to each other, nor are the national park's artist-in-residence programs like each other. There is no template or central office for them: a residency in one park will hardly resemble another in terms of length, duties, or experience. As there is no established protocol for it, this year I helped advise the Allegheny National Forest on setting up its own artist residency program.

I was surprised when you said that my career was closely associated with government. I do suppose government touches everything after all, and I must remember to thank them for providing great assistance to the universities I attended, as well as to the museums and libraries that are so key. But the largest part of my career has been centered on my exhibitions at wonderful places like Gross McCleaf Gallery, where people who are interested can see my paintings and help support me through collecting my works.

TP: The Group of Seven certainly. Maybe it’s my Canadian heritage or having spent much of my formative years among similar northern environments. Their paintings were shockingly bold, diverse, and often great. As for other artists: George Inness, Daniel Garber, Bonnard, Vuillard, Derain, Lucien Freud, Anselm Kiefer, Ernest Lawson, Soren Emil Carlsen––the list would never end.

EJ: I admire your tenacity and your ability to make the three-year mega-project, America’s River Re-Explored: Paintings of the Mississippi from Source to Gulf. How did you get the overhead views? Your paintings containing figures or buildings feel fundamentally different from the ones that depict unspoiled nature.

EJ: ...French Creek Study is more abstract, and more about paint. Are you working more abstractly in a new body of work?

TP: I do have a particularly large mountain of waste paint on my palette just now. I try to be careful about what I throw away, but considering the quantities of paint I use, these mountains are inevitable. I have also used leftover paint to create smaller, completely non-objective paintings that are almost ludicrously thick with paint. These paintings need to wait for just the right colors that are left over from other work. "No New Paint" is the rule, and the process continues until the day they feel done. I have always moved between abstraction and representation; I like teetering on the precipice that divides them. It’s a liminal place as when the rational world morphs into dreams at night.