Thomas Campbell

Thomas Campbell is a painter, photographer, filmmaker, writer and amateur philosopher. He is almost entirely self-taught, learning his skills via personal experience and trial and error. He spends most of his time traversing the globe on surf trips, making films and shooting photographs, but he maintains a small painting studio in Santa Cruz, California. Campbell’s artworks combine scribbles and scriptures, taking slogans and anecdotes from his unique vocabulary and juxtaposing them with a profound look at human nature. The works, typically composed of several panels, are free-flowing with wide expressionist swipes of color, bold graphics and intricate renderings of characters and text. Campbell has mounted solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Paris, San Francisco, Los Angeles and The Netherlands. In the late 1990s, he began directing feature-length surfing films (The Seedling, Sprout) and is currently in production on his third.