Christopher Thomas

While I love drawing, The Road is better than the Inn.

Miguel de Cervantes

 But there are few things better than a nice inn. My wife and I, on our travels, have experienced the full range of accommodations from the truly luxurious to those where you were afraid to even touch the bed. Travel helps form the narrative of our lives, good and bad, and a good part of that narrative is visual. I have drawn and painted on trips, sitting within nature with a couple of travel watercolor kits, waving away the bugs, while sipping a small flask of bourbon.

 While plein air painting is romantic and appealing, I have found that I need to reflect on a painting and complete it in stages with plenty of time to think about the next move. Now, while traveling, I take multiple photos, make quick gestural sketches, and maybe paint a little back in the hotel room. When I come home, I translate those into a watercolor, which I then lean up on the couch in my studio so I can keep my eye on it while I start the next one. Many times, a painting will end up vastly different than it started out.

 Since the invention of the camera, drawing and painting are less about a simple visual record of travel, than about trying to understand something unspoken about it.

 Our recent trip, two weeks in Thailand, was a visual feast in a part of the world in which I had never been. The paintings in this show are a record of impressions that the cities, the landscape, and the light made on me. They range from the mountains outside Chiang Mai to the statuary surrounding the Grand Palace in Bangkok, and many places in between.