. . . Over the past twenty-five years, my studio work has been drawing, painting, and printmaking.  My work has been inspired by a fascination with our collective experience of the natural world, or various phenomena of landscape, for example.  It is also concerned with concepts of our collective memory as embodied in myth and the expression of these myths in the oral traditions of North American native song and story telling, tribal ritual objects, and ceremonial paraphernalia of the culture as a whole. Finding links between the deep past and present are essential elements in my exploration.  Using the organic vitality of patterns and structures, I seek to reclaim and revitalize these links to archaic systems of belief, a primary focus of my work.

Larry Thomas

. . . For the past two years my work, painting in particular, has been focused on the natural phenomenon of light and the mysterious, elusive moods that define the atmospheric qualities of the northern California coastal environment.  Images sometimes incorporate a second layer of suggestion and meaning through the presence of island forms and sand spits, which seem to appear on the horizon.  These secondary forms, partially hidden in atmospheric veils, suggest thoughts of a distant landscape, lost in mist and time, inhabited by unknown peoples who live at the edge of the world.

. . . A complement to these vast landscapes and beach environments are images more carefully executed and highly focused in drawings and prints suggesting organic forms of rocks, plants, sand pools, logs, and bull kelp washed up by the tides.  These images, unlike the larger works, are highly specific.  Often these rendered observations employ a fine, distinct line which reveals the impact of the burnished graphic qualities of the materials used to produce them: the gravers, etching needles, and copper plates.  Abstract tone and texture from overlaid aquatints synthesize the intricate definition of the scribed line with soft, washy tonal transitions – together creating an atmosphere that enriches the prints and comments on and reflects the mysterious, inexplicable qualities of the larger environment which contains the image.