AVAILABLE WORKS
Please contact the artist at m.taber.thomas@gmail.com for information on availability and pricing. Additional artworks can be found at Susan Calloway Fine Arts.
Elizabeth Bennett: Pride and Prejudice
Oil on Canvas, 30 x 40”, 2016
Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Summer
Summer, 2016, Oil on Panel, 12 x 16
Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
Swift as the swallow along the river’s light
Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
-George Meredith, ‘Love in the Valley’
The Tempest: “Where the bee sucks, there suck I”
Oil on Panel, 12 x 12”, 2016
Where the bee sucks. there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest
The Weird Sisters
Charcoal on Arches, 44.5 x 60″, 2018
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
–Macbeth, William Shakespeare
Fanfare in Purple and Gold
Oil on Canvas, 24 x 30”, 2015
Art is a goddess of dainty thought, reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others. She is, withal selfishly occupied with her own perfection only – having no desire to teach.
-James Abbott McNeill Whistler, ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’
Lady Slane: All Passion Spent
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”, 2016
Sitting there in the sun at Hampstead, in the late summer, under the south wall and the ripened peaches, doing nothing with her hands, she remembered the day she had become engaged to Henry. She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, ….And what, precisely, had been herself, she wondered—an old woman looking back on the girl she had once been? This wondering was the softest, most wistful, of occupations; yet it was not melancholy; it was, rather, the last, supreme luxury; a luxury she had waited all her life to indulge. There was just time, in this reprieve before death, to indulge herself to the full. She had, after all, nothing else to do. For the first time in all her life—no, for the first time since her marriage—she had nothing else to do. She could lie back against death and examine life. Meanwhile, the air was full of the sound of bees.
-Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent
Lawrence Seldon: House of Mirth
Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48, 2016
He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was standing, and she continued to question him…
‘Don’t you ever mind,’ she asked suddenly, ‘not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?’
He followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and shabby walls.
‘Don’t I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?’
‘And having to work—do you mind that?’
‘Oh, the work itself is not so bad—I’m rather fond of the law.’
‘No; but the being tied down: the routine—don’t you ever want to get away, to see new places and people?’
‘Horribly—especially when I see all my friends rushing to the steamer.’
She drew a sympathetic breath. ‘But do you mind enough—to marry to get out of it?’
Selden broke into a laugh. ‘God forbid!’ he declared.
-Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Athena
Athena, 2016, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48
O, warlike Pallas…
Gymnastic virgin of terrific mind,
Dire Gorgon’s bane, unmarried, blessed, kind:
Mother of arts, impetuous; understood,
Rage to the wicked, wisdom to the good:
Female and male, the arts of war are thine…
Hear me, O Goddess, when to thee I pray,
With supplicating voice both night and day,
And in my latest hour, give peace and health,
Propitious times, and necessary wealth,
And, ever present, be thy votaries aid,
O, much implored, art’s parent, blue-eyed maid.
-Orphic Hymn to Athena
Owls
These giant drawings of owls are all approximately 4 feet wide and 5-8 feet tall.
Charcoal on Arches
Installation at Saint Albans School, Washington, DC.
Plein Air Paintings
These are all done in oil on prepared paper, approximately 4 x 6″.
Ruskin’s View in the Lake District
Lake District Hillside
Lake District Pasture
View from Ruskin’s House in the Lake District
Rainstorm Arnisdale Scotland
Loch Hourn Scotland
Hills Across Loch Hourn Scotland
Arnisdale Cottage Scotland
Franciscan Church Salzburg
Hohensalzburg Fortress Salzburg
Stift Nonberg Abbey Salzberg
Monzee Lake Austria
Vanalhaven Maine Rocks
Lucas as a Fop
2011, Oil on Canvas, 44 x 96”
Look upward where the white gull screams, What does it see that we do not see? Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams On some outward voyaging argosy,– Ah! can it be We have lived our lives in a land of dreams! How sad it seems.-Oscar Wilde, Her Voice
Lura: Art for Art’s Sake
2012, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 36″
Jane Eyre: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me”
2017, Oil on Panel, 16 x 20″
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.
-Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Come into the Garden, Maud
2013, oil on panel, 20 x 16”
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the rose is blown.
For a breeze of morning moves,
And the planet of Love is on high,
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves
In a bed of daffodil sky,
To faint in the light of the sun she loves,
To faint in his light, and to die.
-Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama
Naomi: Born to Strange Sights
2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”
If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see…
-John Donne, Song: Go and catch a falling star
An Artful Place
2014, Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48”
The taxi drew up at a wonderful shop—the sort of shop I would never dare to walk through without a reason. We went in by way of the glove and stocking department, but there were things from other departments just dotted about; bottles of scent and a little glass tree with cherries on it and a piece of white branched coral on a sea-green chiffon scarf. Oh, it was an artful place—it must make people who have money want to spend it madly!
The pale grey carpets were as springy as moss and the air was scented; it smelled a bit like bluebells but richer, deeper.
“What does it smell of, exactly?” I said. And Rose said:
“Heaven.”
-Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Cellist
2013, charcoal on arches, 44.5 x 80”
‘T is you that are the music, not your song.
The song is but a door which, opening wide,
Lets forth the pent-up melody inside,
Your spirit’s harmony, which clear and strong
Sings but of you. Throughout your whole life long
Your songs, your thoughts, your doings, each divide
This perfect beauty; waves within a tide,
Or single notes amid a glorious throng.
-Amy Lowell, Listening
Emily Tennyson
2014, oil on panel, 16 x 20”
O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove
That sittest ranging golden hair;
And glad to find thyself so fair,
Poor child, that waitest for thy love!
For now her father’s chimney glows
In expectation of a guest;
And thinking “this will please him best,”
She takes a riband or a rose;
For he will see them on to-night;
And with the thought her colour burns;
And, having left the glass, she turns
Once more to set a ringlet right;
And, even when she turn’d, the curse
Had fallen, and her future Lord
Was drown’d in passing thro’ the ford,
Or kill’d in falling from his horse.
-Tennyson, In Memoriam
Forrest Fop II
2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 48”
Ay! though the gorgèd asp of passion feed
On my boy’s heart, yet have I burst the bars,
Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed
The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!
-Oscar Wilde, Apologia
Orlando: Eyes like Drenched Violets
2010, oil on panel, 9 x 12”
Directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize.
–Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Orlando: Sitting Still in a Chair and Thinking
2011, oil on canvas, 64 x 64”
What can the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament in which Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore—since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now—there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind.
-Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Reading the Rubaiyat: Study
2013, oil on panel, 14 x 11”
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
-Edward FitzGerald, trans., The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Abby with her Violin
2009, oil on panel, 11 x 14”
All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
All night has the casement jessamine stirr’d
To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama
Pied Piper
11″ x 14″
Oil on Panel
2010
“Come in!” — the Mayor cried, looking bigger
And in did come the strangest figure!
His queer long coat from heel to head
Was half of yellow and half of red,
And he himself was tall and thin,
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin,
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin,
But lips where smile went out and in;
There was no guessing his kith and kin:
And nobody could enough admire
The tall man and his quaint attire.
Quoth one: “It’s as my great-grandsire,
“Starting up at the Trump of Doom’s tone,
“Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!”
-“The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” Robert Browning
Dreaming Spires
11″ x 14″
Oil on Panel
2009
This winter-eve is warm, Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring, The tender purple spray on copse and briers! And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening“Thyrsis: A Monody,” Mathew Arnold
Maud Taber-Thomas 