About

Thomas Garner was raised under the glow of Southern California sunshine. He studied art at UCSD at a time when everything was Conceptual and Avant-Garde: Installation Art, Performance Art, Video Art, etc.
Thomas went to do his junior year abroad at the Academia di Belli Arti in Venice. He fell in love with all things Italian, and there was no turning back. Everything was too exciting and too interesting. He learned directly from the great Venetian masters: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Tiepolo.
His love affair with Italy lasted 24 years where he bought a 17th century home on the beautiful Brenta River that flows into the heart of the Venetian lagoon, married Italian, and had three sons. He built a successful career in the fashion business. He worked as a graphic designer for some of the biggest brands of the time such as Diesel, Benetton, Nordica, and eventually as Creative Director at Replay. He published a book in Italy of his design called Casual Design by Thomas Garner. He was a member of the Italian art group, Gruppo Tata, founded by renowned artist/designer Ennio Chiggio. During this period he worked on many portrait commissions among which were Princess Stephanie of Monaco and her children and Eros Ramazzotti and his family.
He was later repatriated to Los Angeles by Lucky Brand as Art Director. He currently works freelance, designing graphics for such clients as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and John Fogerty. He teaches at UCLA Extension Classical Painting in the Style of the Venetian Masters among other classes, and at the Kline Academy. He has exhibited widely from Milan to Los Angeles. See his website at: tomgarner.com and YouTube channel Thomas Garner.

Current Paintings (excerpt from a show of his Urban Paintings)
These paintings were conceived as a “drive-by” snapshot collage of LA. The drive-by blur is expressive of movement, and hence time. The “drive-thru” view is expressive of recurrent memory, in this case, diaphanous, ephemeral space compressed like shiny reflections on glass surfaces. Garner has painted a multiplicity of signs, both literal and metaphorical of our wonderful multi-everything sunset city.
This new body of Urban Paintings is actually embedded in work he started many years ago, inspired by Classical Venetian painting and the school where he studied. That work was about Art and Art history and how we see Art through the perceptual and cultural filters of representation and presentation (paintings of pictures of paintings in museums.)
In this new work the cultural filter is Photoshop, a digital palimpsest that can leave residual traces of what came before, the layering of one image over another. Classical oil painting is all about glazing, scumbling and varnishing transparent layers so that what is underneath is never completely lost. The surface thus becomes rich, dense, and glassy with a great sense of depth. This Urban work tries to bridge these old and new technologies.
These paintings are on denim as opposed to linen or cotton canvas because it is more appropriate to the urban subject matter. They are masked off at the edges and sometimes silhouetted to give the sense of something cutout from reality, stolen or expropriated. They are layered, glazed and varnished in the manner of classical painting.
Garner’s painting style started out as photo-realist, but with time he learned the craft of the masters, so that now he is able to create a unified mechanism between technique and content, painting about painting.