Travel is a defining activity essential to my paintings. Since 1985 my landscape paintings and drawings
have been site specific and directly related to my travels. A shift has taken place in my work over the last
few years. Previously my work was generated through on-site observation and extensive use of slide
photography. After a point I had the need to work more from memory. Looking first, then allowing those
observations to be filtered by time and introspection. Eventually, I would combine imaginary events with
real places. Now I find myself almost daily taking my paintings through radical changes of place and
atmosphere. It is imperative that things shift – one experience flowing into another – enjoying the muddle
while allowing a kind of critical mass to develop eventually pointing me to a conclusion. It was Paul
Theroux who accurately described traveling as an “experiment in space”. This is a sentiment that certainly
resonates with any artist, particularly a landscape painter.

In this exhibit, Return To Blue Hill, I am showing among others some recent paintings depicting Painted
Bluff on the Tennessee River near Guntersville, Alabama and the woods above Bald River Falls in
Tennessee just south of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. My friend, Dr. Jan Simek, an
archeologist at the University of Tennessee, introduced me to these sites. At Painted Bluff I was hired to
document through renderings the symbolic images painted on the face of the Bluff by the Mississippian
Mound People more than 700 years ago. At Bald River we explored an ancient burial ground and ritual
campsite. These paintings are my response to those experiences. I mention this because it relates directly
to the title of this exhibit. As a student I made a painting based on a place, Blue Hill, introduced to me by a
friend. It was from that point I began to understand the importance of a sense of place and the poetics of
space.

I think of my paintings as beautiful and I think of them as sublime.


Thomas Riesing began teaching painting and drawing at the University of Tennessee in 1973. He was a
Visiting Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio in 1992 and at the National Academy of Fine
Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1993. Since 1995 he has been a Visiting Artist/Lecturer at seventeen
different universities and academies in China including the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, Sichuan
University in Chengdu, Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in Chongqing, Guangxi Normal University in Guilin,
and Fujian Normal University in Fuzhou. He was awarded the position of Guest Professor 2000-2005 at
Sichuan University where he has been active in establishing an exchange program and official linkage with
the University of Tennessee. He was awarded a permanent Guest Professorship in 2006. Riesing has been
the recipient of numerous Professional Development Awards and an NEH Endowment grant from the
University of Tennessee to facilitate his work in China. He was also the recipient of the Ellen McClung
Berry Professorship for Art at the University of Tennessee from 1999-2002 and again in 2002-2005. He
received a Lily Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship in 1978.

Riesing has exhibited his work extensively in the USA and abroad. He was one of three western artists
invited to participate in the “1998 Asia-Pacific Contemporary Art Exhibition” in Fuzhou, China and is
scheduled for three exhibitions in China in 2008. His work is in many public, corporate and private
collections including Coca-Cola in Atlanta, GA; Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville and
Chattanooga, TN; Opryland Inc. in Nashville, TN; Northern Telecom Corp. in Nashville, TN; Zhongyin
International Industrial Corp. in Fuzhou, China; Miami University and Miami Fine Arts Gallery in Oxford,
OH; Davidson College Art Gallery in Davidson, NC; and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. He
attended the University of Nebraska where he received his BFA and MFA degrees.