Article
Thomas George, artist
Born in New York City in 1918, George graduated from Dartmouth College in 1940, and served in the United States Navy in World War II, drawing terrain maps used in coastal invasions. After the war he studied art in Paris and Florence on the G.I. Bill, a period represented in the exhi bition by two portraits of Gino, a fellow student at the Art Academy in Florence. Although George has continued with figu rative drawings in his sketchbooks, his great interest has been landscape--mountains, sea, sky, trees, and gardens-which he has observed, described, and evoked in various locations throughout the world. In the mid- 1950s he moved with his family to Japan to study traditional brush painting, a technique he subsequently adapted in his calligraphic views of Norway's dramatic Lofoten Islands, which he first visited in 1966, and of the limestone peaks of Guilin, China, where he made two five-week trips in 1974 and 1976 (becoming one of the first Western artists permitted to work in mainland China after 1949).
Beginning in the late 1950s he had a series of one-man exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, where his abstract oil paintings...reflect what George has described as "my goal to create a 'new reality' from what I see and feel." In 1969, George moved to Princeton, where he has been particularly inspired by the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study. He made hundreds of pastels there every spring and summer between 1984 and 1996-always noting the time of day, usually early morning or early evening, as a record of the angle and color of light. In a subsequent series of vibrant watercolors executed in 1998 in New Mexico...George found the answer to uniting the two dominating impulses in his work-black-and-white, and color-in the strong lines, intense shadows, and spectacular hues of the mountains above Santa Fe.
Beginning in the late 1950s he had a series of one-man exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City, where his abstract oil paintings...reflect what George has described as "my goal to create a 'new reality' from what I see and feel." In 1969, George moved to Princeton, where he has been particularly inspired by the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study. He made hundreds of pastels there every spring and summer between 1984 and 1996-always noting the time of day, usually early morning or early evening, as a record of the angle and color of light. In a subsequent series of vibrant watercolors executed in 1998 in New Mexico...George found the answer to uniting the two dominating impulses in his work-black-and-white, and color-in the strong lines, intense shadows, and spectacular hues of the mountains above Santa Fe.
