Maureen C. O’Brien

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“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1798

Thomas Sgouros’s remembered landscapes are anchored in visual experience, stripped of extraneous evidence, and reduced to essential motifs. He perfected this language of landscape painting as a mature artist, when diminished sight prevented him from recording specific views. The theft of tangible references was excruciating to a lifelong draftsman, but his mind’s eye held a trove of impressions informed by nature and by works of art. He channeled those recollections in a reinvented practice in which subject became sensation, and floods of color, like musical chords, replaced individual notes.

Tom was a master of line and illustration. His still-life paintings paid homage to Chardin’s homely vessels, illuminated from unseen windows. He carefully placed familiar objects in staged tableaux where they reflected glancing points of light. The result was a marriage of drawing and painting in which translucent interiors floated within firm contours. The exchange of those defined forms for fluid veils of color was an act of daring, which he performed like a trapeze artist releasing himself from the bar. The leap of faith required a revised methodology and the disciplined construction of a memorized palette. With this new kit of tools, he forged an expansive technique, opening windows to views of chromatic harmony.

A glimpse into Tom’s teaching practice at RISD hints at his reservoirs of optical information. When he brought students to the museum’s print room to examine British and American watercolors he internalized a wide range of techniques. In the turbulent washes of Turner and Sargent he discovered abstract fields of color and atmosphere. But he also studied Winslow Homer’s 1889 Hunting Dogs in a Boat, in which opaque pigments dapple the coats of attentive hounds and saturate a bank of autumn foliage. Another favorite was Thomas Eakins’s Baseball Players Practicing, depicting two members of the 1875 Philadelphia Athletics team in crisply detailed uniforms. Curious about Eakins’s process, he would follow the bands of sun-bleached grass, pursuing their watery flow beyond the edges of the window mat.

Tom was fascinated by the ever-changing effects of natural light and by the ways in which a simple mark could conjure the activities of daily life. He found both in the watercolors of George Chinnery, a British artist who spent much of his career in India and China and whose figures were conjured from animated curves. He later evoked Chinnery’s humid skies, faded yellow over the course of time. He was equally charmed by picturesque façades in Samuel Prout’s English towns, and by such humble observations as women carrying baskets on laundry day. In art and in life, he gravitated toward human interactions, and his remembered landscapes, while unpopulated, are an expression of that engagement. Forced to liberate narrative from his paintings, he replaced it with meditations on personal experience, re-envisioned in luminous horizons and in the lyric poetry of nature.