Tom Palmore

     For more than 45 years, Tom Palmore’s portraits of animals have earned him a distinctive reputation for his masterful technical prowess and his reverence for his subject. His hyper-real renderings of animals in oil and acrylic offer a unique, and sophisticatedly whimsical, juxtaposition of technical literalism and surreal or magically real, imaginative context—questioning the established conventions of photography and painting, especially as evident in the portrait genre.

     Palmore’s witty and whimsical portraits take the human inclination toward personification of animals to an extreme. He is widely admired for incredible detail, clever titles, and playful allusions to art history. It has been said of the artist that he approaches each painting as though it were commissioned by the subject itself. This role reversal, between artist and subject, is perhaps one of the principal ways the artist achieves the illusionary quality so intrinsic to his work. “My paintings are about other earthlings that we share this planet with… and about our relationship with them.” Palmore’s paintings exude eloquence that elevates his subjects’ status and renders them in oil and acrylic with the dignity—even personality—suggestive of his view of their full partnership on the earth with humans.

     Known for his extraordinary facility with detail, his talent is illustrated in the lifelike details he achieves in a fur coat, for example, with thousands of tiny, individually painted hairs. The glossy sheen of a jungle cat’s wet nose and the iridescent feathers of a tropical bird likewise evinces Palmore’s singular adherence to meticulous precision and serves to emphasize his subjects’ suitability as main characters within his tableaux.

Palmore carefully chooses his subjects’ settings, which may include romantic landscapes or patterned textiles. Often, Palmore incorporates background themes or motifs that can be seen as ironic, such as bird wallpaper in a portrait of a cat, or oddly fitting, like Egyptian Bee Eater Birds in front of hieroglyphic papyrus flowers. These aspects illuminate allegorical meanings that introduce new interpretive possibilities within the work. “I realized early on that the background is a critical part of the painting and that it can be the element which creates wit or surprise,” says Palmore. “I’ve also learned that the background possibilities are infinite because they are only limited by my imagination.”

     Born in Oklahoma in 1945, Tom Palmore was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in the late 1960s. His work is held in prestigious private and public collections such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Denver Museum of Art, Colorado; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York, among others.