Richard E. Steele Artist in Residence Emeritus
As Artist in Residence, my work continues to celebrate authentic passion and help create an accessible narrative to guide culture. World culture is facing crisis including inequality, pollution, food poison, and climate change, wherein personal faith and personal meaning must be subordinate to moral realism โ an impartial, social point of view. Given this global ecological crisis, art can seductively โshowโ the necessity of protecting the life of the planet and species adaption to the environment - the necessity of justly regulating biological evolution to minimize suffering and maximize well-being. Artists, as cultural doctors, can โshowโ that social justice necessitates an earth-wide civic religion that transcends theism and atheism - to achieve the new ecological order and moral beauty.
)ยปThomas Cornell was brought to Bowdoin to establish a visual arts program that provides a solid foundation in perceptual drawing and painting. Known in his early career for his drawings and etchings, he has focused on painting since the 1970s. His first publication, The Monkey, examined the process of evolution. His next publication by the Gehenna Press was The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf, including twenty-one portraits of French revolutionary figures. In the 1960's, he established the Tragos Press, and the first editions focused on Frederick Douglass and Bayard Rustin, Responding to the Vietnam War, Cornell painted a triptych, The Dance of Death, in 1969. In the 1970s, he returned to the exploration of images of nature, using them to address modern social and environmental ethical concerns. In this spirit, he began painting perceptual landscapes in specific Maine settings as well as a series of paintings on The Birth of Nature. Cornell has accepted occasional portrait commissions and a commission to paint four large pictures, The Four Ages, for the John Hancock Life Insurance Company. In 1987, he began his Bathers series composed of large figurative paintings presenting the human potential for living in harmony with others and with nature. These images seek to depict people interacting without the inhibiting stereotypes of age, gender, class or race, and particularly show men tenderly caring for young children, a theme rarely found in Western art. Cornell works to make images that can model the positive changes that may develop in human conduct through the accurate perception of nature and humanity.
A graduate of Amherst College, Cornell studied for a year at Yale School of Art and Architecture. In addition to Bowdoin, he has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Princeton University. He has received many awards, including a Fulbright Grant, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship in 1966. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1983. His work is present in art books, most notably Rizzoli's Post-Modernism, The New Classicism in Art and Architecture by Charles Jencks. He has had five one-man exhibitions in New York City and seven major museum exhibitons, including a Bowdoin College Museum of Art exhibition in 1990, with a catalogue essay by Martica Sawin.
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