When I recently visited Barbara Earl Thomas’s studio in Seattle, she was deeply absorbed in the delicate process of sculpting a tiny figure out of plasticine clay—a gremlin, as she described it. With each pinch and scrape, it took on a more playful and mischievous character. Thomas was anxious to finish this first little body to be cast as part of a larger composition: it would join beetles and snakes weaving their way up the stems of her glass candelabra. The work marks the beginning of a new creative path—one that draws on her decades-long artistic practice while also inviting fresh exploration.  

For Thomas, sculpting plasticine for casting is a novel challenge. After more than 40 years of making art, she continues to seek out new avenues of expression at every turn. “I go off on the edge, and I don’t know where I’m going. I just don’t know, but I’m going to do it anyway.” For some artists, this kind of fumbling through the dark might be unmooring, but for Thomas, it only fuels determination and becomes a daily ritual of exploration. “Making is thinking made seen,” she explains, adding, “I build, paint, print—I use glass, paper, steel, whatever surface lends itself best to the story I’ve come to tell. And I have come to tell a story.”

Thomas’s storytelling is deeply rooted in her family’s heritage, reflecting cultural and spiritual traditions from the American South. Thomas was raised by fishermen from Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. Like many Black families during the pre- and post-war years, Thomas’s family migrated west. In the 1940s, they settled into the redlined area of Seattle’s Central District. Thomas was part of the first generation to be born in the Pacific Northwest.

On the walls of her studio is a series of eight linoleum block prints titled The Book of Fishing, which she made between 2006 and 2013. These works are a nod to her heritage, and they tell the fisherman’s story as Thomas has lived it. Growing up, her family fished area lakes for catfish, flounder, and other types of bottom-dwelling fish. This was the Southern way and a very different method of fishing from the salmon fly- and net-fishing of the Scandinavians and Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Thomas says, “Bottom-fish people are a special kind of people because they are living off of what nobody else wants.”  

In the visual allegory of these prints, as in many of her other works, Thomas incorporates themes of human connection and rituals of survival. “A lot of my work has to do with ritual, the ritual of the everyday.”

During our visit, Thomas pulls out a series of large egg tempera paintings on paper. She made them between 2014 and 2016, in response to a chilling news story about mass die-offs of red-winged blackbirds in Arkansas and Louisiana.

Dead birds falling from the sky was a shocking image that, for Thomas, mirrored the senseless deaths of Black youth in the US. “I link the sudden death and raining of Black bird bodies from the sky to that of the ever-mounting violent deaths of young Black boys. Both phenomena are rife with speculation and a dearth of solution.” Across each painting, swirling clouds of yellow, grey, red, and green churn around the red-winged blackbirds as they morph into red-winged Black boys. Cradling each other, birds and boys fall in a tangle of fiery wings, arms, and legs.

As we walk about the studio the weight of the blackbird paintings is still with me. But I am also drawn to the splash of brightly colored works spread across massive cutting tables. These cut paper pieces are about to be carefully packed for exhibition, destined for a showcase halfway across the world. Created in honor of her mentor and friend Jacob Lawrence, they embody Thomas’s distinctive narrative style: marked by flowing composition, vibrant color, and a keen sense of figuration. Her professors at the University of Washington, including Norman Lundin, Michael Spafford, and the legendary Lawrence himself, nurtured these qualities early on.

One of Thomas’s signature techniques is hand-cutting thick black rag paper to create a narrative scene. She “draws” with X-Acto knives and weaves the images together with intricate and interconnected linework. She then composes the background using letterpress and hand-printed color in jewel-toned hues. This chromatic print process yields color passage akin to blending colors on a painter’s canvas. The effect amplifies her linework, creating a glowing, backlit effect not unlike a stained-glass window.

These works were displayed earlier this year alongside Lawrence’s during his first major European retrospective at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, Netherlands. They delve into aspects of Lawrence’s studio practice, his time in New York during the Harlem Renaissance, his playful nature, and his legacy as an educator in Seattle, where he taught Thomas in the 1970s.

While Lawrence's national acclaim was still growing when Thomas studied with him, his teachings have remained central to her practice. “He taught me the elegance in restraint, repetition, and specificity with color, line, and value,” she reflects. “He showed me how to identify these qualities for myself.”

Scanning her workspace, it’s clear that Thomas is not constrained by a single medium or style; instead, she’s drawn to a range of artistic traditions.

The vibrant colors and graphic lines in her Lawrence works stand in contrast to the overcast grays that persist just outside her studio windows. We talk about the impact of the foggy Pacific Northwest atmosphere on her work. Early in her career, Thomas leaned into the earth tones and chromatic gray palette with works in tempera, stating that it was hard not to be affected by whole seasons of flat skies that leave no shadows to define the landscape. Though she still finds beauty in the many colors that exist within the grays, these days her works are suffused with light, their shapes and edges clearly defined.

Looking ahead to 2027, Thomas is planning There Will be Light, an immersive, chapel-like construction for the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington. The walls of the installation will be adorned with swathes of delicately hand-cut Tyvek, a synthetic fiber material Thomas prizes for its durability and ease of cutting. Its illuminated niches will hold blown and cast glass objects and contain a soft interplay of light and shadow. Although the specifics of the story she plans to tell within those walls are still unfolding, Thomas is eager to step into the unknown. However it takes shape, she will surely push the bounds of her creative practice, bridging the universal with the personal. I sense that it will feel much like our studio visit on this quiet, overcast day. Thomas creates a warm invitation—a space for contemplation and an opportunity to access and indulge in a story of one’s own.