Thomas Leo Blackwell (1938 – April 8, 2020) [1] was an American hyperrealist of the original first generation of Photorealists, represented by Louis K. Meisel Gallery. Blackwell is one of the Photorealists most associated with the style. He produced a significant body of work based on the motorcycle, as well as other vehicles including airplanes. [2] In the 1980s, he also began to produce a body of work focused on storefront windows, replete with reflections and mannequins. [3] By 2012, Blackwell had produced 153 Photorealist works. [3]
Blackwell was born in Chicago, Illinois. He started out his career as an abstract-expressionist, but was moved to try his hand at the Pop art movement of the 1960s. [4] It was with his Post-Pop paintings that Blackwell garnered early success; in 1969, his painting "Gook", which was a reaction to the horrors of the Vietnam War, was included in "Human Concern Personal Torment" at the Whitney Museum of American Art. [5] As the artist recounted for the Currier Museum in 2015, "[i]n the late 1960s, I was still finding my voice as an artist. At that point, I was doing Post-Pop paintings, combining imagery from photo-derived sources. One of these included a section of chrome tailpipes, and as I worked on this painting I realized that the rest of the imagery felt extraneous." [6]
By the 1970s, Blackwell had abandoned his earlier Pop sensibilities and was painting in the newly emerging Photorealist style. [7] His early large-scale paintings of motorcycles and engines, highlighted reflective chrome surfaces. [8] His later works continued to build upon this series, and expanded to include a series of storefront windows scenes, which capture layered imagery reflecting from the glass. [9]
Blackwell's paintings are in many prestigious museum collections, including the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, the Museum of Modern Art, [10] the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, [11] and the Parrish Art Museum, [12] amongst others. [13]
Blackwell died on April 8, 2020, as a result of complications from COVID-19. He was 82 years old. [1]