Keith Thomson Canadian, b. 1934

Keith Thomson grew up in a farming community in the Qu’Appelle valley near Craven, Saskatchewan. After high school, he followed his artistic interests by attending and graduating from the four year Commercial Art course at The Alberta Institute of Technology and Art. In later years, it was renamed The Alberta College of Art and Design. After working in the commercial art field for seven years, doing print work, logo design, and fashion drawing for two of Canada’s leading retail stores, he was invited back to the Alberta College of Art to be an art instructor in the Visual Communications program. He taught the Commercial Art program as well as Life Drawing, Anatomy, Silk Screening, Reproduction Camera, and Watercolour Painting. He taught for 25 years at the College of Art and for 10 of those years, he was the Head Program Coordinator of the Visual Communications program. After 25 years of art instructing, he retired to follow his passion of watercolour painting. For the past 23 years, he has been painting full-time and Masters Gallery has exclusively handled his work. His medium of choice has always been watercolour, due to its versatility, fast drying properties, and capacity for detail. Through his many years of painting with subject matter such as farms, farm animals, back alleys, landscape, and a passion to paint aspen trees, Thomson has evolved a truly personal style, uninfluenced by other schools of art, to a distinctive image that has a classic understanding of composition, design, and the dramatic use of colour. Even though many of his large watercolour paintings are produced in the controlled atmosphere of the studio, he has spent countless hours painting and sketching on site. He does not use or copy any digital image as he feels it stymies the true creative artistic process of the imagination.