In Blue Mountains
Oil Paintings by Thomas Locker

Thomas Locker has combined his passion for painting and for nature in the creation of more than thirty children’s books. His recent work, In Blue Mountains: An Artist’s Return to America’s First Wilderness (Bell Bond Books, 2000), is set in Kaaterskill Clove in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Locker traces his fifty-year association with the area through a series of fourteen paintings and text describing his efforts to capture the light, color, or essence of each scene. Intended as a children’s book, it is a work that anyone interested in nature and the landscape can enjoy.

This exhibit features all of the original oil paintings for In Blue Mountains. Locker’s years of research into glazing techniques and paint chemistry have enabled him to achieve a new vision of the natural world. These works also invoke the mystery and beauty of the Catskills in a way that recalls the Hudson River School artists a century ago. As a reviewer said of his earliest poetic landscapes, “They call attention less to nature than to the complex intermingling of perception and thought in the mind of man.”

Born in New York City in 1937, Locker began his career as a landscape painter, and later became an award-winning illustrator. He will be participating in the tenth annual Connecticut Children’s Book Fair on November 10, 2001, where he will be signing copies of In Blue Mountains and his other books.

Babbidge Library, Stevens Gallery
Curator: Norman Stevens