20th Annual Pollak Prizes for Excellence in the Arts
Thomas Van Auken
Visual Artist
Thomas Van Auken (Photo by Jay Paul)
Thomas Van Auken remembers the exact moment when he decided to become an artist. It was in first grade, and he was drawing a horse. “When you’re 6 or 7, you don’t have the vocabulary to describe this particular feeling,” he says, “but nothing else felt like it. Math certainly did not. In fact, it was the opposite of what math felt like.”
After graduating from high school, Van Auken left his native Richmond to study at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., but he returned home and has been here ever since, drawing and painting, with a variety of materials, especially oil paint and, more recently, collage. The Eric Schindler Gallery in Church Hill has shown his work several times over the past two decades.
Van Auken is known for his intuitive realism. “I don’t think it’s an artist’s job to give people what they think they want to see,” he says. “Instead, I show the world as it is. I paint the power lines in the pastoral landscape, the gas station we go to regularly.” He is not offering an opinion of these spaces, but he realizes that his choices bring up questions of how we are using the world. “We collectively choose to put all these things here. We are jointly creating the world we live in, so let’s take a look at it.” How viewers feel about the spaces he paints, he says, is entirely up to them.
Van Auken has taught at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond since 2003, and he has recently been instrumental in the center’s inauguration of the Art League for high school students. This program, he says, is for students who want to go deeper than their regular high school program. Some of it is modeled on a summer program he attended at the North Carolina School of the Arts two years before his high school graduation. That was the first time, he says, that he was taken seriously as an artist, and it was what motivated him to press on.
Gone are the days, Van Auken believes, when an artist could afford a warehouse studio on a dishwasher’s wages, as he did at the beginning of his own career. However, he believes one has to adapt or be left behind. He wants art to be for everyone and not elitist, and with more people moving to Richmond, especially people who are either creating or interested in art, everyone stands to benefit.
Of the future, Van Auken says that he has done a lot of figurative work and a whole lot of landscapes, but something he has not done yet to his satisfaction is combining both. Figures in space are his next step. He says he has always stayed away from directly narrative work but is opening up to it. “As much as I like to seek refuge from the world when I make art, sometimes various social and political things could stand to be addressed.” However, he says, though there is much to be commented on now, he has no desire to be part of the echo chamber. Van Auken says that during the process of making art, he likes giving himself problems and then trying to solve them, so expect his contribution to social and political commentary, when it does come, to be pragmatic and thoughtfully composed, while it generates a new set of questions.
