Thomas Van Housen

Thomas Van Housen has spent three decades exploring how relentless technological innovation, randomness, and unmistakable human touch can share the same canvas. A mathematics graduate turned actuary and executive-search consultant, Van Housen walked away from corporate life in 1990 to devote himself to painting. At that same time, he formed PC/Mac Guru, Ltd., a consultancy to help demystify the new digital tools that would soon reshape every home, office, and studio. The gamble paid off: since then Van Housen has produced and sold more than 2,000 works, building a résumé that ranges from a 41-painting commission for R. J. Reynolds (a coast-to-coast touring series derived from Moonlight Tobacco logos and cigarette-pack iconography) to a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation commission commemorating the Hale-Bopp comet for the departing chairman of its grants committee (also the scientist who also gave us the famed Doomsday Clock).

What distinguishes Van Housen in today's crowded art market is the way he fuses traditional pop-art instincts with cutting-edge process. His artworks are borne by moving back and forth between freehand painting, computer image processing, serigraphy, archival ink-jet prints, and laser toner transfers. Elements from earlier works may become transformed to find a place in surprising ways in new paintings. The resulting surfaces feel simultaneously familiar and futuristic—an effect that has made his canvases sought-after by prominent collectors (including a former board chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art) and by major corporate collections.

His iconographic inventory is equally hybrid. Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, and other pop-culture talismans float beside Buddhist koans, fractal geometry, astronomical photographs, and microscopic imagery, all filtered through a color-saturated graphic language that is unmistakably his own. When patrons bring him a personal photograph or a corporate brand brief, he treats the source material the same way—distilling it through that encyclopedic visual vocabulary until it emerges as a fresh piece of contemporary archeology.

For more than three decades Van Housen has shown steadily in galleries, offices, salons, bars, and restaurants—most memorably at Gordon, the legendary Chicago restaurant where more than sixty of his paintings found homes with local power brokers and international travelers.