Tom Graves – Artist Biography

Tom Graves has a PhD from Cornell University and worked for 40 years in medical research and development.  As a youth, his ambition was to be an artist, but family circumstances prevented him from realizing it. He began painting in his early thirties while living in Princeton, New Jersey, taking courses at local art associations, studying landscape painting with local artist James McGinley and then studying painting on his own.  His favorite time to paint there was winter, in the snow.   While there, he often visited California and took several trips to Yosemite. There he fell in love with the landscape, and he knew he wanted to live in the West to paint. 

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Ultimately, in 1998 he obtained a position in California and moved to Newbury Park, on the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains with their vast open areas and parklands.  Here, his favorite time of year to paint is autumn, when the Sycamore trees turn yellow and orange and the mountains turn green with the rain. The color of the trees against the deep blue of the California sky, the rocky hills, the warm colors of the old grass and bright yellow-green of the new grass is something he will never be tired of.​

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Prior to moving west, he had paintings in many shows in the Princeton and Bucks County, PA areas and was represented by the American Fine Arts Gallery and the Coryell Gallery in Lambertville, NJ. He had solo shows at Princeton University, Rutgers University, the Trenton City Museum and at the Coryell Gallery.

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In California, he has shown at the Thousand Oaks Civic Center, the Canyonwood Gallery (now closed), the Women’s Club of Pasadena, the Santa Monica Mountains State Park Association, Devin Galleries in Coeur d Alene, and  other local art shows.  He has had solo shows at the High Street Studio (now closed), the King Gillette Ranch visitor center, the First California Bank in Camarillo, and the Seven Oaks Fitness and Rehabilitation Center.  He was represented by the Morseburg galleries until it closed.  He is an artist member of the California Art Club.

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He stopped painting in 2011 after a failed retina reattachment operation left him with sight in only one eye but resumed painting in 2019.