Starting from Lower Right: SPRING FLOWERS, Oil on paper, 31 x 30"
CABBAGE AND TREVISO, (detail) Oil on board, 18 x 18"
CARROTS, Oil on board, 18 x 18"
MEMORY ROSES, (detail) Oil on board, 18 x 18"
KALE, Oil on board, 18 x 18"
The artist at work
SPRING, Oil on board, 15 x 15"
MAMA HEN, Oil on board, 18 x 18"
Photographer: Gary Mamay
Artist Barbara Thomas has been a nature painter throughout her painting life. Using the East End’s natural surroundings as a background, Barbara has begun to include her gardening into her work. For years she has grown a flower and vegetable garden, and most recently designed a specific garden of giant variety sunflowers as an art project. “The process of creating your ‘model’ from seed, a squash, or a sunflower, and then picking it and bringing it into the studio, studying it closely and painting it, is very similar to the cook growing carrots, pulling them from the ground, and creating a dish out of them,” Barbara says....Read more about Art and Food, Food and Art project at Estia's Little Kitchen
Barbara Thomas studied at Art Students League under American Naturalist painter Edwin Dickinson (1891-1978), and at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In early 2015 Barbara received her MFA in Visual Arts at Lesley University College of Art and Design, Boston MA. After a decade in the commercial art world, she turned to painting full time. Beginning in the 1980s Barbara has painted the iconic landscapes and waterways of the East End of Long Island, capturing the vestiges of the historic farmland and large open fields. Barbara began painting specific commissioned portraits of houses, gardens, and landscapes in the early 1990s and has expanded to commissions of ranches, golf courses, animals, and yachts. Her work is in the collections of many prominent Hamptons residents, as well as all over the country. Her work has been written about in national magazines Architectural Digest, Forbes, The Robb Report, and Town and Country, and regional publications New York Magazine, Quest Magazine, Hamptons Magazine, and Hamptons Cottages and Gardens.
Barbara paints in a representational manner, taking her subjects from nature. Her work captures seasons, weather, nature forms, and architecture.
Always reaching out for new subjects and ideas in painting, Barbara has recently begun abstracting her nature forms. She is expanding her materials as well, working in video as well as traditional media.
Barbara teaches still life and plein air drawing and painting in her Springs Studio as well as at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY.