Selling Art for a Cause

At 93, Thomas George no longer travels the world, climbing mountains and discovering new places, but he’s still able to paint, and his memories of the world continue to influence his work.

Dozens of George’s most recent paintings are on view in “Inscape,” an exhibit on view at the Princeton Arts Council’s Paul Robeson Center through Oct. 26.

The works are small, gouache paintings, meaning the artist created them with a mix of watercolor and white paint. George painted them over the course of two to three years. Each is on sale with proceeds to benefit the Thomas George Fund at the Princeton Area Community Foundation, which offers grants to young artists in central New Jersey.

In his artist’s statement, George writes that these paintings are small “because they have no need to be big.” A smaller canvas also helps him keep things simple and to concentrate on each particular image.

The paintings are untitled, labeled only by numbers, so it’s up to the viewer to determine what he or she is looking at. But it’s clear these are nature scenes, many featuring the sun while others depict plains, forests and mountains.

“They’re intuitive and they come from your gut,” George said. “You see, I’m old now and I’ve been to a lot places, done a lot of studies outdoors.I’ve done a lot of work that I can’t do today because of physical limitations.”

Although he’s seen many different countries, these these paintings are not site-specific. More so than working from memories, he says, they represent “intuitive feelings” about the world. Those feelings, he says, are always with him, and emerge as he creates.

“When you start working in an area… and you’re alone and you have your drawing and painting materials there, you just begin,” he says. “And I believe that what comes out is evocative of all the previous study and feelings about specific places in the world.“

Some of the images are more abstract than others. And some depict scenes that no travelers other than astronauts get to see. There are celestial images among the landscapes, including one that shows the sun at the top of the frame, its bottom curve nearly touching Earth below it.

“That’s been one of my interests, the cosmological side of it,” George sa. “That has a lot to do with what’s going on today with what they’re discovering about the universe expanding and some of Einstein’s speculations are being tested again… I’ve always been very interested in that cosmological side, so that enters into it too.” His vision of nature, he says, is not limited to the earth, it also includes the earth.

One of the galactic images (painting No. 22) depicts the sun, or perhaps it’s the moon, close to earth’s horizon. It’s a colorful image, with lines of mostly red and green in the moon, while the horizon features brown, blue and red. Another painting nearby is less colorful, consisting of blues and white, and has an ice-like feel to it.

George has been painting for more than 60 years. His work is held in the collections of  institutions including the Guggenheim, MOMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C. and the Tate Gallery in London. He was also the subject of a career-spanning exhibit at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005.

The real goal of the “Inscape” exhibit, he says, is to raise money for his foundation. About six or seven paintings had been sold as of this writing, but in this economy, George makes no assumptions about how well his works will sell, though he’s optimistic.

“People apparently react to them positively and the work cheers them up in a difficult period in our history,” he says. “So each of us, if we can give a little bit of what we have to make people properly appreciate the world that we live despite all the negative parts, I think that’s worth doing.”

“Inscape” is on view at the Arts Council of Princeton’s Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, 102 Witherspoon St., Princeton through Oct. 26. For information, call 609-924-8777 or visit ArtsCouncilOfPrinceton.org.