Larry Thomas is a gifted calligrapher, printmaker and painter. For this year’s Material Matters, we wanted to draw attention to these remarkable pen and ink drawings from a series he has been working on for calligraphy designs.
The “Gone Bird” series of images as well as the on-going title “Gone Bird” was taken from a line in the poem “How to Draw a Better Bird” by Tom Crawford and published in his recent book of poems, “What a Waste of Stars.” Thomas received permission to use that poem from his estate for an etching in a folio of work published by the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology to be presented to special contributors to the Center.
“I also use the two-word phrase, “Gone Bird,” as an appropriate title for an ongoing series of work devoted to an alphabet of letters that incorporate images of birds and serpents intertwined with each capital letter. The poem itself, as well as the two-word phrase, point directly to the fragile balance of environmental components at play on the edge of drastic, irreversible change.”
Larry Thomas received his BFA from the Memphis Academy of Arts and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he went on to teach from 1981 until 2005, later becoming Dean of Academic Affairs and Interim President. He taught at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland, and served as a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology.
His artwork is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, and National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, among others.
Larry Thomas is a visual artist living and working in rural Mendocino County, California. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, resident at the Djerassi Artists Program, Ragdale Foundation and Sitka Center for Art & Ecology; recipient of two NEA fellowships and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. His work has been shown regionally and nationally and is represented in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the SF Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California as well as in the artist books collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Houghton Library at Harvard among others. He held academic teaching and administrative positions of Associate Professor, Departmental Chair, Dean of Academic Affairs and Interim President at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1982 -2005.