Biography from Trailside Galleries - WY:
| One of the foremost exponents of wildlife painting in the United States, Thomas Quinn is renowned for his stunning watercolors of the birds and animals of northern California. Although his work lies within the realm of realism, subtlety, elegance, and nuance are the true hallmarks of his aesthetic.
Quinn’s distinctive style is characterized by a masterful use of composition, space, and color, along with a virtuoso technique. Adhering to a “less is more” approach, he creates suggestive and very ethereal images of wildlife – to the extent you are afraid to look away because they might simply vanish.
Growing up in Marin County, California, he developed a familiarity with the animals, birds, and plants of that region on childhood jaunts through the marshes and arroyos near his home. His interest in wildlife was given further impetus when, at age five, he was given a copy of Wildlife Animals Of North America, which featured illustrations by the artist – naturalist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and led to his illustration career.
Quinn attended the College of Marin, and graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Then he went to New York and illustrated not animals, but people, for "Saturday Evening Post", "Reader’s Digest", "Argosy", and "Field & Stream".
In 1966, Quinn experienced a near-fatal illness that hospitalized him for a year. While recuperating, he rediscovered the natural world and began painting the Canada geese in the vicinity of his Connecticut home. Feeling unfulfilled by his work as an illustrator and wanting to re-experience the environment he had enjoyed as a child, he moved to Point Reyes, continuing to accept illustration assignments until 1974, when he became a full-time professional painter.
Working almost exclusively in watercolor, Quinn draws his subjects from his immediate environment, studying and observing the birds and animals that inhabit the hills and marshlands around point Reyes. Although he portrays an array of animals, waterfowl, and game birds, he tends to favor the Canada goose, attracted to its subtle coloring, its intelligence, and its remarkable instinct for survival in an ever-threatening environment.
Quinn is a participant in the annual Birds in Art exhibition at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, where he was selected as Master Wildlife Artist for 1998. In 1988, a major solo exhibition of his work, “Thomas Quinn: The Man and His Art,” was held at the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York. A profile on his art appeared in the April 2000 issue of "Southwest Art".
One of his watercolors, "The Wind Readers", is in an exhibit that opened in May 2000 at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming.Thomas Quinn’s work was selected for the 2002 Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage show. |
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