Tom Curry

Tom Curry Biography

Tom Curry is an accomplished painter, who who paints both the wild places and the small villages and harbors on the peninsula near his studio in Brooklin, Maine. A en plein air artist at heart, Curry prefers working outdoors in direct contact with the clear, searing light or a dense fog, the heat of the sun or a frigid wind, the sounds of crickets or the distant drone of a fishing boat, and the smell of salt air. “I still can’t believe how gorgeous it [Maine] is; it’s serene, but disheveled; it’s raw and not overly organized.”

Curry, who has been painting for over twenty-five years, frequently revisits the landscape of Chatto, a small island just offshore from his home. Chatto has become the subject of an ongoing series of more than sixty paintings, many of which were highlighted in the monograph Island: Paintings by Tom Curry (Down East Books 2012). The enduring magnetism of Curry’s island paintings is his ability to depict what he calls the paradox of place: “It is not fixed, but always changing—the light shifts from moment to moment, water is never still, clouds come and go.”

For Curry, the landscape is more than a passive backdrop of scenery. His work explores the passing of time and the relationship between stillness and flux. He wants the viewer to feel alive—to experience the wild, muscular, and ultimately unknowable mysteries of natural forces that are breathing, ever changing, and seamless.

Curry’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Down East Magazine, Art New England, Island Journal, Bangor Daily News, Ellsworth American, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker. Curry earned his MS from University of Massachusetts in 1987. He holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, 1981, and he attended a Graduate Program at Yale University in 1982.

Mirage-like, Chatto becomes a manifestation of one’s desire to find something enduring in the view—in what can sometimes be a dark world. — Carl Little, Courthouse Gallery exhibition catalog 2020

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