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Arts & Entertainment

Artist Profile: Thomas Strychacz

English professor finds beauty in the details.

Tom Strychacz has been painting for about 25 years. It all started when his wife, bought him a set of paints when he was 25. He started out doing things artists are supposed to do, like still life paintings. Frustrated, he put painting aside for a few years before coming back to it with a style that worked for him.

Strychacz grew up in the middle of England and came to the United States at age 20 to study for his Ph.D  in American literature at Princeton. Strychacz met Reiss at creative writing class at Duke University, while on a student exchange. They've been married 28 years and Reiss is the author of novels for youth.

The only art classes Strychacz has taken were in high school at age 16. He recalls his teacher writing in his report card, “Tom should give it up."

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  “We did things like draw a motorbike, but mine never looked like a motor bike.”

Painting in oil paints with tiny brushes, Strychacz's detailed landscape style developed over time. “There are fewer rules in the kind of naive painting I do. If I make a mistake you can write it off as 'I meant to do it.' " His first paintings were of houses and landscapes, with no faces on people whose backs were turned.

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“I like color, bright color, and lots of it, so I focus on that first. I like small details and jokey details,” Strychacz says while pointing to sheep looking out of the corner of the canvas. The painting is a scene from England's Lake District with dogs running in the fields of sheep, a Boy Scout camp and his own family wading through a stream, a memory of their holiday. “I like the sense that they are telling a story.”

Many paintings are very personal, some too personal to part with. One in particular was painted after the death of his sister. Another has his daughter Isabelle's name painted into the garden maze.

Paintings take two weeks to six months to complete. “It's hard to quantify the amount of effort and turn that into a price,” Strychacz says. Friends do commission him to paint specific works, which makes it easier to part with the work.

Strychacz doesn't force it, painting on weekends and on breaks. “I get into times when I do a lot of painting for days on end. Other times, other stuff gets in the way.

“I definitely feel that as soon as I sit down and start doing it, partly because it's so detailed, it's a very relaxing routine. It's really fun to do.”

Strychacz does not paint in a studio. Instead, he moves his easel around the house. “It works for me. It doesn't work for Kathryn so much since the whole dining table is covered with canvases and paints for days on end.”

He's shown his work at the Blue Heron Gallery in Yountville and , and participates in Benicia Open Studios every year, for which he opens their Jefferson Street home.

Some paintings have been turned  into cards and posters, but Strychacz admits that it's not always worth the expense, time and energy. The owner of the Blue Heron gallery asked him what he'll do if his paintings start selling quickly. It would be a challenge since he teaches English at Mills College, where he's been since 1988.

Strychacz occasionally paints Benicia scenes, though a bit fictional, with his own house and random city houses with snow added to the scene. is the subject of one painting, with some artistic license.

Which this artist is happy to take: “You can break the rules a little bit in realistic painting,” he says.

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