Tom Glover

Tom Glover is a seemingly lackadaisical ne’er-do-well, but really is an artist teeming with ideas. He was class clown at Keene High School in Keene, New Hampshire where he grew up many moons ago. His first painting sold for ten dollars when he was fourteen. It was of a horse. It was to a girl he thought was cute who lived at the end of the lake he summered on. He is shameless.
He is also a shameless thief, even though his wife doesn’t like him to say that. His prowess as a young comedian in high school was mostly drawn from Monty Python sketches, Laugh-in and Peter Sellers. He steals from other artists which he justifies by citing various quips from Picasso. For instance: Picasso said that, “mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal”. T.S. Eliot said the same thing but it is hard to know which of the great artists stole it from the other. Giacometti complained that he didn’t like Picasso visiting his studio because the next week he would go to Picasso’s studio and see all his ideas there! 
Glover teaches art/painting and often incites his students to steal from other artists. He is constantly encouraging them to look at what the other students in the classroom are doing. He also encourages them to go look at what the great masters painted and steal, steal, steal! Sometimes he uses the word “procure” to make his wife a little happier.
Religions are of great interest to Glover and he is troubled by those who concretize their Gods. He likes saying words like concretize. He learned words like concretize in college where he actually earned a legitimate B.F.A. degree. He studied painting with John Laurent, John Hatch, Sigmund Abeles and Conley Harris, among others, at the University in Durham, New Hampshire.
He likes to sit on his front porch early in the morning watching the birds and sipping his cappuccino, which technically is a “flat white” because he doesn’t know how to make a cappuccino even though he has been to Italy a few times. In Italy he studied important painters such as Caravaggio, Piero Della Francesca, Botticelli, DaVinci, to drop a few names. In Amsterdam he studied Rembrandt, Picasso (Guernica), Van Gogh, Vermeer—all artists he could steal from.
When in college Glover travelled to New York City and knocked on the front door of Kurt Vonnegut’s brownstone across from Audrey Hepburn’s brownstone, to drop another name. He was hoping to take the famous writer to lunch, and perhaps Audrey would join them. It was a supreme act of hubris by the twenty year old art student. He never took either of them to lunch but did walk Vonnegut’s house cleaner to the Dag Hammerskjold building. She would not eat lunch with him either.
Another person Glover did not take to lunch but enjoys reading is Ernest Hemingway. He also enjoys reading Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, James Joyce, Carl Jung among other thinkers and philosophers— non of whom he has taken to lunch.
Glover is a certified scuba diver with mill foil weed extraction certification as well. He has paintings in museums, corporate  collections and all willy-nilly throughout the land and across the pond. He has had two paintings stolen. He likes people who buy his paintings, although once a Yankee fan bought a big Fenway Park painting…. but he likes her too, even though she is not a Red Sox fan.

This painting is from a series of paintings which began as more representational work and moved into more abstraction. This particular painting clings to many realistic characteristics of ice chunks and ice flows one sees in the tidal rivers all around the seacoast region. My process inevitably begins to eliminate the less important characteristics of a subject in order to emphasize its nature, or its essence. It tends to be a continuous deconstruction of a subject, a decision making bonanza to whittle it down to its essential components.
I have spent much time over the years walking out on the ice flows and along the tidal rivers to gather imagery which informs my painting. Even though I often focus on more abstract issues in paintings these days, the immersion in the ever changing landscape of this area never ceases to spark ideas and send me off into new explorations of landscape and abstraction.