Exhibiting overview
Formative years
Education & environmental awakening
Spiritual awakening

EXHIBITING OVERVIEW

After receiving an M.F.A. degree in 1993, I began the interesting journey of sharing my work and my vision. Because I work as a graphic artist, have strong environmental concerns, and study with a spiritual teacher, exhibiting is not my highest priority. In light of that, I am grateful for whatever attention, publications and honors I have accumulated since I left college. It amazes me that so much has happened.

In 2004, after painting with water media for 21 years, I returned to oil paint. The subject matter, birds and landscapes, have not changed, but the feel of my work has. From 2005 to 2007, I was President of Amigos de Bolsa Chica, one of the oldest and most successful grassroot environmental groups in California (www.amigosdebolsachica.org). I remain on the board of directors and committed to the organization's mission to educate people about the importance of wetlands. This has been a challenging and rewarding way to channel my environmental concerns.

Thomas Anderson Graphic Design Portfolio - a few of my favorite printed projects.

Exhibition Highlights:

Birds in Art, Last Train Home, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, September-November 2008

48th Art and the Animal, Plover and Algae, Neville Public Museum, Green Bay, Wisconsin, September-November 2008

47th Art and the Animal, Her Blue Body, The Wildlife Experience, Parker, Colorado, September-November 2008

The Art of Seeing: Nature Revealed Through Illustration, Sonora, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, January-June 2006

Southwest Art Magazine, "For the Birds" article, April 2006

45th Art and the Animal, Goodbye for Now, Nevada State Museum, September-November 2005

California Watercolor Association 36th Annual National Exhibition, Loafers #2, Academy of Art College, San Francisco, June 2004

4 Centuries of Birds in Paintings, Sculpture and Fine Prints, Night Heron, Clarke Galleries, travelling exhibit, Vermont: December 2003, Florida: January-March 2004, New York: April-May 2004

Wildlife Art Magazine, Night Heron, September-October 2003 Issue

The Art of Seeing: Nature Revealed Through Illustration, Three paintings selected, Oakland Museum of California, 2003

Society of Animal Artists - My work was juried into this venerable organization in April of 2002
See www.societyofanimalartists.com

Splash 7 - The Celebration of Light(North Light Books), Blue Grouse painting selected 2002

Birds in Art, Night Heron, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, 2001

California Species: Biological Art and Illustration, 3 paintings selected, Oakland Museum of California, 2000-2001

Nature of Black and White, 2 pieces selected, Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum in Oradell, New Jersey, 2000

The Best Of Wildlife Art 2 (North Light Books), Red-breasted Megansers painting selected, 1999

Birds in Art, Crows, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, 1999

Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art Sales and Rental Gallery, 1998 - 2004

The Best of Wildlife Art (North Light Books), White Pelicans painted selected 1997

California Species: Biological Art and Illustration, 2 paintings selected, Oakland Museum of California, 1997

Pacific Rim Art Exposition (also known as the Pac Rim Wildlife Art Show) in 1994-95 (Tacoma, WA), 1997- 2000 (Seattle, WA);

Placing in the top 100 finishers of the Federal Duck Stamp Program in 1993 and 1995
Complete list of exhibitions

FORMATIVE YEARS
I was fascinated with birds and their surroundings right from the start. I was born on a farm in Iowa in 1959. Those pre-school days were filled with finding Robin's nests, chasing fledgling Barn Swallows and exploring the farm. On my fifth birthday, I received The Giant Golden Book of Birds, which not only helped me learn to read, but I can also remember spending hours tracing its marvelous paintings by Arthur Singer.Even then I envied birds, their tenacity, their beauty, their detachment from human concerns--despite the hardships they endure. I really wished I was a bird. I wanted to be able to fly. Being human seemed so limited.

We moved to suburban Mesa, Arizona when I was seven, and my fascination with nature was overwhelmed by the dissolution of my nuclear family unit. That experience brought out my preoccupation with existential questions like 'why are we here?' 'what is the point of all the pain and drama people cause each other?' and 'what is the meaning of life?' Being creative, especially drawing and painting, became more than escapism for me. It was part of the answer. I left home when I was 15 and lived with my sister in Iowa. I finished high school in Cedar Rapids, got my first job as a part time graphic artist at a television station there, and decided that I would go to college in California to study art when I graduated.

I chose a public university with a good art department, California State University at Long Beach. At about the same time, I found a part time job as a graphic artist with the City of Cypress that I have had ever since. I survived the transition from rapidograph-exacto knife-rubber cement to mostly computer generated artwork, and now I can't imagine creating graphic art without a computer. For a long time I thought being a graphic artist was just a way to pay the bills, but I've grown to feel that graphic arts and painting are totally inseparable for me. They contribute so much to one another. My sense for designing a 2-D space, the desire for visual variety in all of my work stem from this daily interaction.

EDUCATION & ENVIRONMENTAL AWAKENING

My goal when I started college and working as a graphic artist was to be a freelance illustrator. I was employed as a graphic artist at that time (and I still am), so I had the luxury of experimenting, of taking the time to find my voice as an artist, and to not limit myself to having a strictly commercial voice. I found much joy and ease in those early years of experimenting with different media--oils, acrylics, sculpting, printmaking--with the exception of watercolor. That was where I met my match. I think because I struggled with watercolor longer than other media, and then once I discovered I could make it do many other things besides the wet look most often associated with watercolor, I became hooked on its simplicity, immediacy and lack of toxicity. It took several years, but I grew into its demands on the integrity of the drawing and composition, and on the color and light.

One day in early 1982, while in the midst of my Bacherlor of Fine Arts studies in illustration at Cal State Long Beach, I went for a walk in an undeveloped corner of southeast Long Beach. Never quite sure where the man-made ended and the natural began, I literally stumbled off the landfill and found a small tendril of ocean and a number of birds that I hadn't thought existed in Southern California. It was at that moment--standing in the mud and small marsh plants, seeing birds I knew only from the Giant Golden book of Birds, surrounded by marinas, shopping malls, oil wells and a monolithic power plant--that my childhood fascinations returned. My desire to understand California's natural history and the bigger picture of global ecology awakened. That particular tendril of ocean (which is called Los Cerritos wetlands), I soon learned, was part of a once vast estuary that was dredged and filled and covered with city, a fate to which all of California's wetlands have succumbed to varying degrees.

Later that year I made my first trips to the saltwater wetlands at Bolsa Chica and Upper Newport Bay. Something was ignited in my heart--or reignited. At first I felt a great deal of anger at the destruction of natural habitat strictly to serve the greed and hedonism of our grossly materialistic culture. Then I got busy. By the time I completed the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration program in 1984, I knew that whatever plans I had for being a freelance illustrator had to shift with this uncontrollable desire to paint birds. Perhaps not the smartest of career moves, but something else was happening I could not put my finger on. I did not know it at that time, but I was well on the way to a greater awakening.

Coastal saltwater wetlands are, along with rainforests, the most biologically productive ecosystems on the planet. They are also fragile, easily ignored and frequently a coveted place to cover with marinas or overpriced oceanfront real estate. Well over ten thousand acres of coastal wetlands existed in Los Angeles and Orange Counties in 1900. When I started studying them in the mid 80's, there were less than a few thousand acres, most of them threatened by development. So I photographed and I painted. I took some classes about the history and ecology of the Bolsa Chica wetlands at Coastline College. Bolsa Chica is the largest remaining coastal saltwater wetland habitat in Southern California. Although this land has been degraded over the last hundred years by farming, oil wells and poorly planned development of suburbia, it is still possible--especially when flocks of shorebirds or terns or ducks are present--to get a sense of what this place was like before Europeans arrived.

I then returned to Cal State Long Beach to sharpen my focus on this passion. Through my paintings, I wanted to show what was being lost. I created some strong editorial pieces, yet that was not a feeling I could sustain for a prolonged period. So I made a decision at that time to avoid preachiness, and learned to get my feelings for nature - my love of the beauty, joy and freedom that stirred my heart - on to paper. Not long before I started work on my Master of Fine Arts project in 1988, I began regularly donating artwork to the Amigos de Bolsa Chica. The Amigos was at that time a non-profit political lobbying organization whose mission was to preserve and restore this threatened ecosystem. This seemed to be the most logical thing to do, given that I still felt too angry, too at odds with the world to be an educator or scientist.

Painting what I saw at the Ecological Reserves at Bolsa Chica and Upper Newport Bay was the basis for my M.F.A. which I completed in 1993.  I was finding a way to synthesize my enthusiasm for painting with my respect for science and the joy and serenity I derive from observing and appreciating nature, especially birds. Since then it has become a template for the way I strive to observe and understand everything that happens in my "backyard" to the greatest extent I can.

In the spring of 2000, I was honored to be asked to join the Board of the Bolsa Chica Foundation, an arm of Amigos de Bolsa Chica that was organized to create and oversee educational projects concerning the wetlands. The future is looking good for Bolsa Chica. After much study and planning, restoring this ecosystem to the fully functional saltwater wetland that it once was, with natural tidal flushing, is now a reality. Groundbreaking on the new tidal inlet and restoration of 550 acres of Bolsa Chica lowlands took place in October 2004, and the project was completed in August of 2006. To find out more, visit www.amigosdebolsachica.org

At the beginning of 2004, I was appointed Chair of the Bolsa Chica Foundation. Shortly thereafter, the Amigos de Bolsa Chica decided it's political lobbying days on behalf of the Bolsa Chica wetlands were winding down, and voted to merge with the Foundation. Providing education about this vital ecosystem which has undergone so much change in the last hundred years is the main focus of the organization. In 2005, I became interim President of the Amigos de Bolsa Chica while we transitioned from a 501(c)(4) political lobbying organization to a 501(c)(3) education foundation. In 2006, the IRS granted Amigos de Bolsa Chica a non-profit foundation status, and I was elected President. It was an exciting time to lead this group through the restoration project and see the ocean flow once again into parts of the wetlands that had not felt the tides in over 100 years.

Never content to paint the same thing in the same way over and over, between 1999 and 2003, I began pushing watercolor and ink in search of new things to say about birds and landscapes. Some of my simplest and strongest work was the result of this restlessness. Yet there was a tension of wanting to say something new, to paint in a different way, to express something I had not expressed before and simply to be a better painter. It finally became too strong. I reached a point where, after 21 years of painting exclusively with water media, I felt I had nothing new to say. It was time for a bigger change.

After several years of contemplation, after two months of staring at a blank canvas, I finally picked up my 21 year old tubes of oil paint and started using them again in July of 2004. Much to my amazement, they were still ready and waiting. It has been a great pleasure, as if everything I've learned from watercolor brought me to this point. Drama and atmosphere are probably the two most important things to me in a painting. Capturing them with watercolor or ink has always been challenging, and I've learned a great deal about how to do it over the years. Probably because of all that I've learned with watercolor, drama and atmosphere seem to flow automatically in oil. Color and the absence of color are also extremely important to me, and my use of oils has been shaped by what watercolor taught me in that area. So while the subject matter has not changed, how I approach it has. I invite all to watch as a new body of work forms.

SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
After a long illness, my mother passed away in 1992. Three years later, my partner of 15 years died from a series of illnesses brought on by HIV. This should have been a joyous time in my life: completing my M.F.A. and beginning exhibiting my work. Yet by the end of 1996, I was not feeling happy with the way I was fitting into the world on all levels. A friend introduced me to a spiritual teacher named Anandi Devi.

I'd never really considered myself to be on a spiritual path, but there were some unusual synchronicities surrounding this introduction. From the moment I met Anandi, I had complete faith and trust that this humble woman would heal my heart and change my life. Not coincidentally, it was also around this time that I began another committed relationship that has thrived to this day. After 12 years, Brian and I were married in an intimate ceremony attended by close family members in 2008.

To make a very long story very short, Anandi has shown me the way to true and lasting freedom and happiness. With a highly developed and focused gift of unconditional love, she teaches how to embrace, forgive and let go of negative patterns and thought forms.  This spiritual psychology has turned out to be just what I have longed for all of my life, and studying with an enlightened being has been the most challenging and rewarding experience of my life. It is constant work to follow her teachings, but the rewards are infinite.

One of the greatest doorways on this path was opened when she explained, "We change the world by changing ourselves, changing our hearts, our minds and our emotions. All our thoughts and all our feelings are felt everywhere. There are no separate minds or separate hearts. Our consciousness, our hearts effect the entire planet, all of humanity, all of life. When you're truly happy, you can't hurt anyone or anything."

Anandi's teachings are at once highly contemporary and ancient. They are simple yet quite difficult to maintain in a world filled with distractions. They are not about processing or analyzing what's buried in the mind. That's really just entertainment, or torture, and not a solution. This path is about going deep inside the heart, into the soul's desire to have union with divinity, to return to a state of harmony with all of humanity and all life on this planet. It is about understanding that God is Love and Love is God. With so much of humanity in the grips of negativity, of fear, doubt, anger, numbness, guilt and repression, the simple, if not always easy, lessons for healing the heart are very practical remedies for an ancient problem.

My concerns for birds, wetlands, the health of the earth and my creativity are the definition of my life's purpose. Now I understand that all that matters is what's in my heart. Everything else is a distraction, the pain of the illusion of being separate from God, from Love, from each other and from all life on the planet. I know now I can't change much, if anything, beyond my own heart, but the effect that alone can have on this planet is not to be underestimated. While I will always paint, create and express my concerns, my priorities are to continue freeing myself from the pain and illusion of separation, and to serve in what ever ways are the highest for my gifts, creative and otherwise.