To read an interview that seems to capture the spirit of my work, please see Mary Soliwoda's interview with me. -- Thomas

Thomas Paquette paints full-time. Born the eighth of eleven children, he completed his formal art education with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting on a full graduate fellowship offered by Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 1988, directly after earning his BFA degree in Painting (graduating summa cum laude) at Bemidji State University in 1985.

Thomas was then awarded a CAVA Residency-Fellowship for three winters in Miami from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts from 1989-91. Following that, he moved to Maine to paint the wilder lands there, and worked on some large public commissions listed below. In 2001 he relocated to the Victorian Allegheny River town of Warren, Pennsylvania, after marrying his wife Ellen.

Thomas draws inspiration from the natural world immediately surrounding him in the Allegheny National Forest, and just as frequently from more distant excursions. Hardly considering himself a plein air artist, he paints outdoors on-site only in preliminary stages. Even a watercolor begun outdoors is only finished after some reconsideration in his studio.

Among several other public and private commissions that he was awarded are four seven-foot-high canvases for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis; a thirty-two-foot long canvas for Central Lakes College in Minnesota; an eleven-foot painting for the State Office Building in St. Paul; and paintings for the collection of the opulent Queen Mary 2 ocean liner.

Thomas was an artist in residence at several places including the American Academy in Rome, the Millay Colony, McNamara Foundation, USM Aegean Arts and Cultural Exchange, three National Parks. He presented lectures around Greece when his paintings were installed at the U.S. embassy in Athens in 2006, and at other times gave talks at the University of Wales in Cardiff, and at Plymouth College in Exeter, England, as well as a few colleges in the U.S.

In 2007, the book Thomas Paquette: Gouaches was published to accompany a traveling museum exhibition of his gouache paintings.

His paintings have been featured 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). 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.