Thomas Lawson

Lives and works in Los Angeles County, CA, USA

Artist statement

I center my art-making around painting, although I sometimes detour into small books and large scale public murals. I am a painter, but I begin with a photograph, usually discovered on the internet or in the various print media that I scour for material. I have been doing this for over forty years, using as a starting point cheap toys, images culled from various public media (from newspapers and television to the web), postcards, movie stills, pictures of public statuary, maps and other diagrams. Over the years I have copied, obscured, abstracted and variously up-ended these pictures to make visually complex and challenging paintings. I begin with a found image, something already known, and translate it, through drawing; flipping, reversing, or distorting it in some way. As the work moves on to become painting various decisions about color and color relationships come into play, along with questions of application, texture, and pattern. The hoped for result is not just eye-catching, but eye-troubling, raising questions about perception and representation on an optical and visceral level. This is a way to understand how pictures in general shape thought, in the hope of finding a way to get them to carry meaning for me. Appalled by both the rhetoric and the actions of the Trump regime, I have found the last several years challenging as an artist (not to mention as a citizen). I have never been convinced by activist and protest art, and while my work has always been concerned...

Artwork