About the Artist

Tom is a painter and architect who has lived in Oak Park since 2001. He started the much-lauded sustainability-focused architecture firm, TBDA, in 2006 in Oak Park’s Arts District, where it continues to thrive.  In 2018 he finally heeded a long-simmering call to paint landscapes.  

A childhood spent largely outdoors in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio left Tom with a tapestry of personal experiences in the landscape overlaid with times of passage and family memories. To the artist, the changing colors, textures, and light of the seasons offered great inspiration and challenge, and proved and endless tableau to develop aesthetic ideas in the pursuit of meaning and connection. Workshops with notable landscape painters such as Marc Hanson, Terry Miura, and Joe Paquet, as well as a wealth of online instruction, supported his pursuit of craft and technique.

Until this past year, most of his work has been plein air landscape—paintings made on location. More recently, Tom has been creating abstract work as a way to develop compositional ideas through intuition, often rooted in concepts of environmental conflict—the “burning world.”

“Painting has become an important complement to my architecture practice. In addition to reinforcing principles of design and color, I call making art ‘feeling lessons,’ in which creative progress hinges on the ability to more deeply harness the emotional potential of a subject through composition, and to fully develop its character, allowing discoveries by leaning into all the joys and discomforts throughout the creative process.”

Tom works primarily in oils, including all his plein air landscapes, with some acrylic/mixed media for abstract pieces. His work can be seen at his online gallery, during the What’s Blooming On Harrison event (May, Oak Park, IL), and at plein air festivals in Oak Park and Charlevoix, MI. Tom is open to gallery representation but has not actively pursued it yet.

Online Gallery

I hope you enjoy the gallery! You can click "More Info" on pieces to see them in a virtual room, and also see if I've written anything more about the piece.

Art work can be purchased here through this site, and shipped via UPS. For these, a 10% charge is added, minimum $35. If you're in the area, I'm happy to meet you at my studio on Harrison Street and sell directly. Note that prices typically reflect unframed art, although some of them are framed, and that is noted in the description (see "More Info" on the piece).

Please send a message if you've seen work on Instagram or in-person that isn't here on the site, and I can let you know what availability and pricing is. For pieces purchased through this site, if you're not satisfied for any reason, I'm happy to refund the art amount if returned within 30 days.