Thomas Pringle

According to Thomas Pringle (b. 1941), he got his first job at 1½ years old picking fruit from trees. A few months later he was paid for collecting rattlesnakes in a sack, and a year after that he became the youngest fighter pilot in WWII. Once, he threw a line off Pier 39 and caught a shark using bits of squid as bait. To top it all off, at the age of nine he heroically, and safely, crash-landed an airplane into a large sandbox at a children’s playground. No children were harmed. Life is how you tell it, art is what you call it, and Pringle states, “What I see is what I draw.” But how can you trust a fabled raconteur like Thomas Pringle? You look at his work, and listen to what it tells you. His line is true; it is honest. The erasures of its early attempts are in plain sight. He’ll leave the three tries at an eye’s shape stacked above and below the best one. The multiple versions of a bent elbow move faintly beneath the solidified final choice.

A master of all drawing media, Pringle is an accomplished painter as well. Recchiuti Confections, one of our community arts partners, chose a quartet of his colorful canine portraits to adorn their 4^th series of artisanal chocolates (2010). And as for those colors, Pringle has this to say: "I just pick colors as I go along. I figure out what the colors should be. I keep mixing or looking until I get the color I want. To get the color gold you need four colors: orange, yellow, blue, and white. Not too much blue. If you mix those up in the right order you'll get pure gold. There's some gold that's a dirty gold. A nurse gave me some gold paint in a jar when I was in the hospital about three years ago. I was doing artwork in the hospital."

Pringle has been spinning yarns and making art in our studios since 2006.