Works of Former Princetonian Thomas George Featured at Arts Council Exhibition and Sale

TOWN TOPICS - JULY 24, 2024

“TRAVELS WITH THOMAS GEORGE”: The Arts Council of Princeton will be hosting an exhibition and art sale August 1-4 featuring the works of the late internationally celebrated artist and Princeton resident Thomas George. The painting pictured above is George’s “North Garden, Bodnant,” a 1994 watercolor.

By Donald Gilpin

“Travels with Thomas George,” an unusual art show and sale featuring about 100 works by the late artist and Princeton resident, will take place at the Arts Council of Princeton’s (ACP) Taplin Gallery August 1-4.

George’s work, which is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the National Gallery of American Art, the Tate Gallery, and many other museums and collections in the United States and abroad, spans a variety of different subject matter and represents a number of different mediums.

Local scenery — trees of Marquand Park, the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study, and other places people will recognize — as well as sketches of the Maine coast, and art work reflecting his travels in Europe, Japan, and China — will be displayed and available for purchase at the ACP. George spent 30 summers in a house he bought in a small village on a fjord in Norway, where he focused on painting and drawing the surrounding mountains.

“Even though much of my work is basically abstract, I rely on nature for knowledge and inspiration,” Thomas once said, as quoted in his October 29, 2014 obituary in Town Topics. “Looking at nature is where it all starts for me.”

Before his death in 2014, George presented popular local shows at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005 and at the ACP in 2011. His sons, John and Geoff George, own a large collection of their father’s works, including wood cuts, prints, oils, drawings, pastels, and watercolors.

“It’s going to be set up in a less formal way than our gallery normally is, so it will be fun for people to sift through and find treasures,” said ACP’s Timothy M. Andrews Artistic Director Maria Evans.

“The range is really wide,” said Evans. “There’s so much affordable art work. There are some tiny pieces, some large pieces, and medium pieces. Some are framed, some unframed, and there are also some matted pencil sketches. It’s very diverse.”

Evans worked with John George to price everything. She described stacks of items starting at about $15 and going up to hundreds of dollars. “As you can imagine, John and his brother have lots of his father’s work,” she said. “He was very prolific, and they wanted to start sharing the wealth and getting it out there, unloading storage bins that they have.”

Evans promised “very exciting price points,” and a portion of the proceeds will go to the ACP to support community programs.

“To my father, Tom George, his life was his art,” said John George, as quoted in an ACP press release. “Classically trained, Tom travelled through many stages in his over 60 years as an artist — from realism to impressionism and ultimately to abstraction — with nature always as the foundation of his work.”

He continued, “Tom worked in many media throughout his life. I am hoping, through this event, to share Tom’s legacy and to find ‘good homes’ for the many pieces of my father’s work which I have inherited and which have brought me so much pleasure over the years.”

Evans reflected on the ACP’s association with Thomas George. ”I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas George when he had a solo exhibition in our Taplin Gallery back in 2011,” she wrote. “I was in awe of his talent and how flexible and talented he was in all mediums. Now, years later, it’s super exciting to work with Thomas’ son John and John’s wife Annie in offering Thomas George originals and prints to the public at such reasonable prices. I hope everyone can come out and get a Tom George work (or three) to treasure and enjoy, as there is most certainly something for everyone.”

An opening event is on Thursday, August 1 from 5 to 7 p.m. Gallery hours will be Friday, August 2 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday, August 3 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, August 4, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Also taking place on August 3 will be the ACP’s yART sale with about 30 different vendors setting up their wares in front of the building, in the parking lot, and alongside the building. “It’s sort of like a studio clean-out,” said Evans. “We’ll have ceramic artists, jewelers, printmakers, and painters.”

She added, “It’s a great place to get an original work and a bargain. Last year there were people walking away with armloads of ceramic bowls. One woman said, ‘I got my Christmas shopping done.’”

The Chinese Mountain Drawings of Tom George

Art International - September, 1977

It is interesting to see what an American painter and draughtsman makes of them when he comes face to face with Chinese mountains. Tom George has Iong shown a passion for mountain peaks, and many know him best through his depictions of Norway's stony heights and gorges. It comes as no surprise therefore, that after great effort, he has now succeeded in visiting the People’s Republic of China with only its celebrated mountains in mind.

Yet Tom George’s interest in these eccentric peaks Is wholly unlike that of the classic Chinese painters of the past. For them, the painting of ”mountain-water pictures” was traditionally a philosophical exercise. The hard, resistant mountains were symbols of yang, the soft erosive rivers symbols of yin. These two together represent the nature of the cosmos. Even the differing brush strokes for mountain and river respectively, echoed the opposite forces, the deep black strokes signifying the masculine spirit of Yang, the gray and misty ones the feminine spirit of Yin. ln as much as all opposites (in a Chinese view) form the unity of nature, a “mountain-water picture” is a declaration of the divine harmony.

In Tom George’s approach, the transformation of nature into art is otherwise. He also uses brushes and black ink; but neither his ink nor his brush strokes would ever be mistaken for Chinese ones. As we see from these vigorous examples, it is the rhythms of their forms, as his sable brush follows the towering cliffs and ridges of the peaks, that are his chief interests. When he has finished it each drawing offers a rich abstract pattern, amounting to a kind of distillation of a Kweilin mountain scene. The more reduced they are in their numbers of strokes, the more concentrated is the effect. Each view not only reflects the movements he discovers in these Chinese mountains but the delight he takes in their rhythmic patterns. Thus, a mountaineer’s eye and a devotees feeling combine in all that this artist reports from his exotic journey. Tom George’s Chinese mountains are likely to be most enjoyed and best understood by Western viewers who have been nurtured in the tradition of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Yet, his bold Western expressionism here offers another bridge to Asia for those who will travel with him.

ART REVIEW; Give His (Abstract) Regards To Norway

The New York Times - August 21, 2005

THE exhibition "Thomas George: A Retrospective" honors a gift by the artist to the Princeton University Art Museum of 37 of his paintings and drawings spanning 50 years.

It is a small but enjoyable show, presenting the opportunity to look at in one place a selection of the work of Mr. George, an 87-year-old Princeton-based painter. It is not often, also, that the lordly Princeton University Art Museum honors local artists.

Mr. George might be ungenerously described as a fringe member of the abstract school. Fringe because he is regarded as something of a pack runner in art historical stakes, but also fringe in the sense that he is not a conventional abstract artist. He makes landscape-based abstractions with a broad range of media, concentrating on capturing mood and atmosphere more than pouring his feelings or emotions into the work.

The exhibition begins with an anomaly -- two figurative studies from the 1950's. They are here to remind us that Mr. George, like most artists of his era, was schooled in drawing. "Portrait Study of Gino" (1951), the most arresting of them, depicts an Italian friend and fellow artist with a disease that prevented him from growing much larger than a child. You sense the sadness in the young man's downcast eyes. He died at age 23.

Landscape dominates from here on out, beginning with "No.17" (1962), a large, beautiful, largely abstract painting and the best work in the exhibition. It brings to mind cloudy, turbulent skies, as well as a forest hillside glimpsed through heavy snow. It also reminded me of a variety of organic natural forms, in particular lichen patches. But it is really just an intuitive accretion of marks and scrapes with a brush and palette knife.

"No.17" was worked up slowly in the studio over days and possibly weeks. That gives it a solidity lacking in other works here, many of which were probably done rapidly out of doors. Beneath the surface also beats movement and feeling, the artist not really knowing entirely -- you sense -- what he is doing or wants to say but going deep into himself. It is risky and a bit out of control, but somehow holds together.

Mr. George loved traveling. Here, on view, are paintings, sketches and drawings from travels to Norway, Japan, Wales, France, Italy, China and other places. Mountains frequently caught his attention, as in a series of schematic brush and ink paintings of the spectacular limestone peaks of Guilin in southern China. Their form is endearingly simple: inky black shapes and wavy lines against a white paper backdrop. But it was Norway, of all places, that exerted the strongest pull on this peripatetic artist. He was enamored of the Lofoten Islands, some 125 miles above the Arctic Circle, and in 1966 established a second home on the Oslo Fjord. He spent the next 30 summers living and working there, camping and painting outdoors in some of the more-remote parts of Norway.

The Norwegian paintings, three of which are here, hint at various different artists and art styles. The black ink on paper format and calligraphic brushstrokes recall Chinese scroll painting, while the choice of picturesque mountain landscapes follows closely in the footsteps of a slew of painters from the late 18th and 19th centuries allied with Romanticism, a pan-European phenomenon that, in art at least, stressed the heroic and sublime.

Mr. George also painted extensively in the United States, often in the Southwest but also in his home state. Showing here, for instance, are some pastel paintings (from a long series produced between 1984 and 1996) done by the pond at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. They are soft, fuzzy and intimate, the artist delicately recording the play of light, its movements and its effects on foliage. They are an avatar of the exquisite.