The Life Cycle of Painter and Children’s Book Author Thomas Locker

For a while now, I've wondered about the legacy of the Hudson River School - the movement that landscape painters founded in the mid-1800s. Thomas Cole, Robert Duncanson and others studied and painted lovely pastoral scenes of the Hudson River, its mountains and its valleys. These paintings told the story of place and time, as much as they housed memory. 

So, I've quietly been in search of a past that might present itself in the present. Enter Thomas Locker, a painter represented by local Tarrytown gallerist Camilla Calhoun and her business partner Nancy Kiesendahl Bloch.

Thomas' journey to become a painter began at age six.  Through a rare happenstance, a European Master painter saw Thomas' grade school drawings and insisted he become his apprentice. This was in the 1940s around a hundred years after the Hudson River School's founding.

"Romano Glitzenstein took me under his wings and taught me to draw by the old European method of copying cast. And at six I drew Michelangelo's Moses and I can still draw it," Thomas explained.

But by the time Thomas entered college he'd decided to become a rabbinical priest; he soon discovered he didn't have the appetite for scholarly readings and the solitary life of the priesthood. Instead he studied Art history, which is how he discovered the Hudson River School,.

"In the sixties, in academic circles [Hudson River School] was considered a provincial, detailed ridden, second rate school of painting. Abstraction and Jackson Pollack were in. So I tried to avoid it all my life but the more I studied nature, the more I went down that path, and that tradition," Thomas said.

Thomas incorporated his studies of classic American painting into his work as a children's book author after seeing a decline in demand in the art market.

"I had a fast trajectory in the art world and I went to what I thought was the mountain top, which was New York and London, and got priced out of the market, which crashed," he said. "I had a house, and four kids and a wife used to a certain lifestyle. So I left the gallery world, which was in tatters, it's a cyclical thing anyway. And I went and made a book, which enabled me to meet my obligations with my family."

This transition for Thomas from galleries to publishing happened in the mid-80s.

Thomas found a curious niche in the children's book world. Instead of painting cartoon characters, he continued to paint in the Hudson River School tradition of landscapes and created full-on paintings instead of commercial illustrations.   

Thomas has written thirty-six children's books to date, but saw the transition into book publishing as difficult; eventually he lost the rights to some of his books in a divorce.

Still his obvious love for painting landscapes, paired well with writing children's books. They fit so well that he often can't tell if the landscapes write the stories or if stories inform the landscapes he paints.

"I've spent a lifetime figuring that out," Thomas said. "I think it goes both ways. But nature has always been the ultimate source of inspiration for me."

Since successfully tackling the children's book market, Thomas has moved back to his traditional paintings.

"Like the art market, the children's book market kind of crashed, well it was more like a gradual decline" he said."Technology came and the industry changed, and I ran out of things to say. I stopped making children's books and I just paint now. I moved from the Hudson River Valley proper into the Catskills just a few miles from the Kaaterskill Clove, which is the home of, and the sacred place of the Hudson River School. It has been a lifelong obsession and now I get to paint it."

At age 73, Thomas spends his life looking onto the Catskills and painting a series of Kaaterskill Fall drawings. Thomas paints from memory, which breaks down into a few categories: short, long and deep memory. 

"Some painters can really penetrate that deep realm of seeing place held in memory. The camera is a one eyed-liar.  Nature, in its essence, is in continual change."

And it is Thomas Locker's goal to capture it, hold it in deep memory, and sing its praise on canvas.   

To see more or contact Thomas Locker contact Camilla Calhoun at camillac@optonline.net or her gallery website: http://www.kandcgallery.com/