page_title: John Paul Thomas
section_title: Scholarly studies
hierarchical_section_title: John Paul Thomas / Scholarly studies
caption_attribution_description: English: John Paul Thomas' analysis of Vermeer painting "The Love Letter" grid overlay #2 showing module and primary axes
context_page_description: John Paul Thomas was an American artist specializing in oil painting, watercolor and drawing in several media. He was also an educator and arts scholar.
context_section_description: Even though Thomas has early roots in Abstract Expressionism, through Baziotes at New York University, critics early on saw him as a maverick, unconcerned with contemporary trends in the arts environment. While his peers were throwing off the trappings of previous conventions, Thomas was developing a system of grids to control the interplay between the two-dimensional surface of a painting and a symbolic third dimension within. He traced the source of the concept to his early studies of Italian Renaissance painters and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, several of whose students were close personal friends. He named his personal application of the grid to the construction of his painting "Symbolic Stereometry". All his work from the end of his first year teaching at the University of Hawaii, Hilo Campus (1966) on, come under the influence of the grid. Concurrently, his response to the quality of light in Hawaii and the tropical vegetation resulted in a parallel study of color, particularly the manner in which the eye perceives color in relation to the colors surrounding it. Over forty years’ of studies on these two subjects are housed at Rod Library Special Collections, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa.
caption: Thomas' analysis of Vermeer painting "The Love Letter" grid overlay #2 showing module and primary axes
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