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= Tom Field (Artist) =

Tom Field (1930 - 14 November 1995) was an American painter. Born in Fort Wayne in 1930, he practiced art in North Carolina and San Francisco, California since the 1950s until his death in 1995. Field is also known as Bay Area painter.

Early life and Education
Tom Field was born in 1930 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. According to Field, he showed his interest in painting at an early age. He told his friends one time that he "took a petunia and smashed it on paper to experiment with colour" at age 5. Encouraged by his aunt, Field attended Central Catholic High School in Fort Wayne and graduated in 1948. Then, he attended the Fort Wayne Art School and left school to serve in the Korean War as an Army medic from 1951 to 1953. Returning to the United States, he used most of his GI Bill money to continue his studies by attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1953 to 1956, where he studied painting and sculpture under Joseph Fiore, John Chamberlain, and Robert Rauschenberg, and humanities under the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.

Career
At age 26, Field moved to San Francisco in 1956 to find work and became a merchant seaman in the Sailors' Union of the Pacific until 1969 to afford himself to buy art supplies white continuing to practice his painting. During his time in San Francisco, he met many Beat writers and Abstract Expressionists. He found a Zen Buddhist community, Hyphen House, with Albert Saijo, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen. As well, Field met an American novelist, Jack Kerouac, and appears in Kerouac's novel "Big Sur" under the pseudonym Lanny Meadows in 1962.

Alongside his friendship with the writers of that time in San Francisco, Field became part of San Francisco Renaissance with Jess Collins and Knute Stiles, as well as with poets Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Ebbe Borregaard, and others.

For many years, Field had his studio in North Beach, and later, he spent ten years painting in a cabin at Bodega Bay.

Later life
Field's fame fell short compared to his friends' successes. Since the 1960s, he received few museum invitations until his death as a minor figure in art. As well, his health had deteriorated and he joined a rehab centre for alcoholics between 1974 and 1977. He suffered from near poverty, remaining relatively unknown until his death at age 65 in November 14, 1995.

Works of Art

 * Murasaki, tale of Geanji (1963)
 * Kent State (1970)
 * Field's Pig I (1977)
 * Frank and Chevy (1978)
 * Red Queen I (1981)
 * Irish Wars (1981)
 * Gulf War (1991)

Exhibitions

 * 1962, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Annual, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, U.S.
 * 1964, San Francisco Art Institute Annual, San Francisco Art Institute, California, U.S.
 * 1978, Seven From Black Mountain -- Paul Alexander, Ruth Asawa, Mary Bowles, Etta Deikman, Tom Field, William McNeill, Knute Stiles, Top Floor Gallery, U.S.
 * 1997, Tom Field's Memorial Retrospective (The title cannot be found), 871 Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco, California, U.S.
 * 2001,Tom Field, Pausing to See: Abstract Expressionist Paintings, Black Mountain College to the San Francisco Bay, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California, U.S.
 * 2021, Stations: Some Recent Acquisitions, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Suggested Further Reading

 * 1) Katz, Vincent. Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
 * 2) Wagstaff, Christopher. Tom Field: on painting at Black Mountain and in San Francisco. Berkeley: Rose Books, 2006.
 * 3) Littlefield, Kinney. “A Pause That Refreshes – And Confuses.” Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2001. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-16-ca-11074-story.html.