Thomas Paquette, a native of Minneapolis, grew up making art and relishing trips to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. For a few years as a young adult, he vagabonded around the country via freight trains and hitch-hiking as far as Alaska, until he gravitated back to his original love of painting. He finished a BFA degree in Painting, graduating summa cum laude, at Bemidji State University in 1985. He went on to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville on a full Fellowship to earn their three-year Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting, and has painted full-time ever since then. Within months of his thesis exhibition, he was awarded a Residency-Fellowship for three winters in Miami from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. He then moved to Maine for ten years, during which time he painted the landscape, continued exhibiting in galleries around the country, and completed large public commissions. He relocated to northwestern Pennsylvania on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest when he married his wife Ellen in 2001.

Paquette draws inspiration from the abundant natural world at his doorstep, but also from his more distant travels, including time spent in Europe. He paints on-site only in preliminary stages - most typically on a small scale in gouache - and doesn't consider a work done until it is back in his studio and has undergone usually much re-working.

Among several other commissions he was awarded both publicly and privately, are four seven-foot-high canvases for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis; a thirty-two-foot long canvas for Central Lakes College; an eleven-foot painting for the State Office building in St. Paul; and paintings for the collection of the opulent Queen Mary 2. In addition to other artist residencies - including one on a Greek island and three in National Parks - Paquette was awarded a visiting artist residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2000. As the guest of the ambassador, Paquette presented lectures when his paintings were installed at the US embassy in Athens, Greece, in 2006. In 2007, the monograph book Thomas Paquette: Gouaches was published to accompany a museum exhibition of his paintings.

Paquette's paintings have been featured in magazines and books, and in several dozen solo exhibitions at nationally prominent art galleries (in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Maine, Minneapolis, Washington DC) and museums (Georgia Museum of Art, Erie Art Museum, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Hoyt Institute of Fine Art). As well, his works have been selected to hang in U.S. diplomatic facilities around the world, including embassies in St. Petersburg, Athens, Rome, Vienna, Santiago, and Taipei.