DEPICTS:
Catastrophe and beauty.
MAKES:
Egg tempera paintings, linocut prints, cut papers, poem-stories, very funny conversation.
WAVES:
At all men driving backhoes in parks department trucks, because that was her father’s job.
“You just have to be brave,” Barbara Earl Thomas told herself one day two years ago. “Get the knife and cut.”
She didn’t draw first. Not even a sketch. She picked up the X-Acto and started slicing at the white paper on her desk. If she made a mistake, she started over.
In no time, the painter and printmaker, now 67, had a new medium. You see it in mural-sized works and an entire illuminated chapel at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, where Earl Thomas’s scenes of disaster are embraced in the minor salvations of her fluid lines. For 35 years, her work has put a little fragile light between us and the worst things. It’s as simple, and remarkable, as that.
Big deal, she would say.
