Third PLACE AWARD OF EXCELLENCE
The San Diego Museum of Art Artists Guild
Open Juried Exhibition
"Connections "
at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts, Poway, California
June 1 – June 30, 2018
Congratulations to our
Third Place Award of Excellence Winner: Thomas Pickarski
for his oil painting on stretched canvas Ice Carnival
Thomas is a multi-media visual and performance artist. The themes he works with include minor obsessions, the bizarre landscape, self realization, and social justice. He often integrates storytelling into his work through text and spoken word.
He holds a BFA in Painting and an MFA in Performance Art, both from Arizona State University. He has had solo exhibitions at The Cultural Center of Cape Cod inMassachusetts, the Harbor Gallery in Boston, and Ormond Memorial Art Museum in Florida. His current photographic exhibition, Floating Blue, debuted at the 10th Annual Songzhuang Art Festival at the Czech China Contemporary Museum in Beijing, China, in the fall of 2017, and is currently scheduled for 5 US cities. His self published photography books include, Floating Blue, The Middle of Nowhere, The End of Nowhere (Stories and Photographs), and, Adventures of Otto, a Tiny Toy Dinosaur.
Thomas lives in Greenwich Village, New York City, USA. His website is: www.thomaspickarski.com
Artist Statement:
Early on in my visual art practice, I became intrigued with the happenstance of occasionally discovering abstracted forms in nature. I developed the process of seeking out unusual shapes, by traveling through the fragile settings and desolate landscapes where they tend to be located. This drew me to arctic regions where I discovered a deep love for the eternal beauty of icebergs. They possess characteristics of color, shape, line, form, and scale that exist independent from visual references we tend to be familiar with in the natural world. I find them to appear sculpturally magnificent, as if crafted in a way that seems too perfect for this world. In my paintings and photographs, I aim to portray both the ethereal beauty of icebergs, as well as the otherworldliness of the landscapes in which they exist.