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  • An Interview with Barbara Earl Thomas
  • Charles Henry Rowell and Barbara Earl Thomas (bio)

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Figure 1.

©Photo by Spike Mafford

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This interview was conducted by telephone on Friday, May 14, 2004, between College Station, Texas, and New York City, where the artist was attending the opening of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence at the DC Moore Gallery. Barbara Earl Thomas is a painter and writer based in Seattle, Washington.

ROWELL: Your paintings suggest that you have been making art for a very long time—perhaps all your life. Will you talk about your evolving in this expressive form—that is, with painting?

THOMAS: I think that you're right to say that. I believe the fact that my family was all from the South (they moved to the Northwest in the early to mid forties) is part of that. I come from what is really a storytelling background—that is, a culture that teaches and communicates through stories and narrative. I think in images. I was copying things all the time from books and newspapers. At some point, when I was about eight years old, I copied an image and gave it to my mother. She seemed so delighted that I did it again and again, and I think my continued impulse to create came from that first gift-giving event to my mother. It seemed that from out of nowhere I was able to make her very happy. It probably drove her crazy after a while, but from my small place at least she seemed to be happy. I also made things, airplanes, trains, and I built things because it seemed very natural to try to put things together. I sometimes combined things that didn't seem naturally to go together. Maybe it was my attempt to give order to the universe. I tried to find patterns in random things. My family was a kind of crafts people. My mother did lots embroidery and crochet. So did my grandmother; we were always sewing up things, constructing things so it seemed natural to work with my hands.

ROWELL: So when did you discover that you could go further with visual art? When did you take the next step?

THOMAS: As I said, I must have been about eight, and after that I just drew and painted all the time. I just did it, and I remember once somebody saying to me much later, "Oh I didn't know you did that. Did you do that all the time?" I said, "Yeah." Thinking back now, I believe it just didn't seem there was a place for it. There was a place for academics, sports and performance of every kind. But there didn't seem to be a place for people who just made things. It didn't seem noteworthy enough to talk [End Page 737] about. But it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. It was only when I got to the University and out in the world that I realized people actually made images that other people might want to see. I was surprised and a little shocked. I asked, "People do this?"

ROWELL: Was that your moment of discovery: that there was an important place for the creation or the making of things?

THOMAS: Yes, I suppose it was a discovery that there was a place for art in the culture that gave people another way to think about their lives, their existence. I began to understand a person might hear the same story, in different forms, by three different people and it might be only on the third encounter that the person would finally get it. Art, for me, was just my way of trying to decipher the mystery that we were in.

ROWELL: Were creative images made around you? When you said the South, I suddenly started thinking of quilt making—not that the people in the Great Migration from the South continued to make quilts when they moved North and West, or to other locations out of the region. Were members of your family engaged in the making of beautiful things?

THOMAS: My...

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