County Court House Painting by Thomas Jewusiak

About the Painter and His Work



Tom Jewusiak has been a working professional painter all of his adult life. He worked his way through college (he is a graduate of Fordham College) by painting street scenes and architecturally interesting buildings and selling his work through private commissions. He has designed homes and presented them through his own architectural renderings in oil on canvas and pen and ink. His love of architecture has brought him to old historic towns, capturing their magic of place through his brush. He inhabits the places he paints always painting on location where possible (even if that location is the interior of his own imagination.)

He now paints only in oil on linen canvas in what at first appears to be a highly representational or even meticulously detailed photorealistic or superrealistic style; but upon examination his work reveals itself as highly "impressionistic", subjective, idealized and even fantastic, a streetscape of the mind- of a bridge unbuilt, demolished or obscured. He is a photographer of the mind’s eye, committing his vision to ground pigment, linseed oil, turpentine and linen cloth.

The painter also produces fine art prints of his own work in archival pigmented inks on canvas cloth. Although limited in edition, numbered and signed by the painter, each canvas giclee print is in fact unique. Each one is individually hand embellished in oil paint.



Photorealism, Hyperrealism, Superrealism or just plain Realism

["Photorealism is an ongoing pop culture phenomenon wherein painters use some mechanical means to recreate sterile photographic images of mundane subject matter often time depicted as an acerbic social statement of our culture and as an aesthetic. As a recognized subset of Photorealism, Hyperrealism takes into account a process of simulation that emphasizes digital degradation, defects and deficiencies of pictorial elements in modern photography and digital imagery. Therefore, content of subject matter is a separate medium through which viewers can connect to reality through the falsity and simulation of the image, which ironically is convincing."] a rigid and limiting set of definitions byDenis Peterson.



Artist’s Statement

I reject the description of the style of my painting as photorealistic. I make no attempt to duplicate a photograph. Although there can be a valid artistic point in doing this, it is decidedly not my point. I attempt to communicate a reality or rather an illusion of actuality, as perceived by the eye and mind that is more intense, more concentrated than that which can be captured by the camera and lens alone. I also attempt a more honest portrayal of what is real than can be produced by the simple photograph. Since many of my paintings are purely conceptual, existing originally only in the imagination, or as a distillation or manipulation of many separate scenes that may exist, did exist or I think existed, the charge of “merely” dupli...

• Nationality: UNITED STATES
• Date of birth : unknown date
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary American Artists