For more than 35 years, Tom Palmore has painted animal portraits with a reverence for his subject and a masterful technical prowess.  His ultra-real portraits of animals in oil and acrylic offer a unique and often comical juxtaposition of technical literalism and surreal, imaginative context.

 

Palmore’s witty and whimsical portraits take our human instinct toward personification of animals to an extreme.  It’s been said of the artist that he approaches each painting as though the subject itself commissioned it.  This inversion of role between artist and subject is perhaps one of the predominant ways the artist achieves the illusionary quality so intrinsic to his work.  When asked what his paintings are about, he says, “They’re about other earthlings that we share this planet with…and about our relationship with them.”  Palmore’s paintings have a masterly 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.

 

Born in Oklahoma in 1945, Palmore’s education and art training occurred at several institutions, concluding with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1969.  His work appears in numerous corporate collections and in such prominent public collections as the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Denver Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the Saint Louis Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.”