The Applegate Art Movement
Tom Applegate. In his own words.
I am happiest when I am outside doing something adventurous. It's my parents fault for moving to the middle of the desert in Arizona when I was two months old. I was being called the desert rat by three and by four I was one. This was when I was exposed to art too. My mother was an artist and painted. My Uncle Fred was an artist and visited us a number of times in the desert.
And once my mothers uncle, a successful artist from New York came to visit. This was about when I got my first paint by numbers set too.
I was Devastated when my parents moved to San Diego when I was five. Finding myself in a city was pure hell. We took to haunting the canyons behind our house and then I discovered the ocean and spent many great days there playing in the waves. I watched the surfers and knew I needed to do that. Eventually I became a rampant surfer and skateboarder. Then my friends parents bought 200 acres of land east of San Diego. It was a wonderland of desert boulders. The dessert was back and has remained back.
I got really into art during my time in San Diego. I was fascinated with art history and studied many books about it and art techniques. My outdoor activities had a major influence on my art
I started getting into rock climbing in my later teens, and after my brand new surfboard was stolen on a surf trip in Mexico, I had to make a decision, buy another surfboard or buy climbing gear. I chose climbing and basically quite surfing for many years. I became a rampant climber. I ended up in North Idaho and was climbing rock, mountains and frozen waterfalls in the northwest and in Canada.
My art shifted to painting mountains and rocks from photos I took on my trips to places like the Bugaboos in Canada.
I became obsessed with becoming a Himalayan climber. K2 was the mountain I dreamed of, not Everest. But an incident with an avalanche on a mountain in Canada that broke my knee into 15 pieces changed that. Snow seemed bad after that. Very bad. I went on to do all my hardest rock climbing after that and became a pilot. Being the adventurous type I eventually got into flying competition aerobatics and did that for about ten years.
My life now is creating art that feels good to me and any particular time. Which may be a landscape, experimental film, an abstract, or creating something combining my paintings and photographs in Photoshop. I work on the beach, surf, climb. do solo desert explorations, explore the mountains and various other things.
I guess my point is that nature and my adventures into it has always been a major artistic influence to me. And the art I produced changed with the changes in my life and activities. That the way I prefer it.
Tom Applegate
There is a whole unimaginable world surrounding all of us. A world of endless possibilities. I can sense it, and sometimes glimpse it. and other times fall into it. Our lives are storylines full of holes that with the proper vision can be filled.