Loads of artists like to paint the beauty of nature, and that inclination has brought us a bounty of stunning 2D landscapes. Phoenix-based Sean Thomas prefers to look at the ways and means of industry — what most of us overlook or actively ignore — and translate them into minimalist but evocative paintings. Using drawing, oil, wax and watercolor, he creates rich layers — often white-on-white — to convey a highway dotted with cars, a factory, a cargo-carrying vessel, a cell tower. “I revel in such feats of engineering, looking at architecture and the modern industrialized landscape with interest and wonder,” Thomas writes in an artist statement. “My work represents those objects as manmade ‘fingerprints’ integrated into the natural environment with varying degrees of harmony and tension.”
