About

Thomas Marshall Carnell

Architect. Artist. Student of Humanity.

My journey to becoming an artist did not begin when I first picked up a brush. It began much earlier, with a pencil, an interest in drawing, and a curiosity about how people and the world around them fit together.

I received my degree in Architecture in 1974 and spent much of my professional life designing buildings and environments. Architecture taught me to look carefully, to understand proportion, composition, light, structure, materials, and the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. My work was recognized with AIA Design Awards for the DuPont Children’s Clinic and the HCA Data Center. I also continued my education through graduate study at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

But drawing and art never left me.

My first-place recognition in drawing at the Atlanta Annual Art Competition in 1969 came before my architectural career, and over the years the two disciplines continued to influence one another. Architecture taught me discipline and structure; art gave me a way to explore the human experience more directly.

Today, my paintings focus largely on people: their faces, gestures, cultures, work, passions, and moments of connection. I am interested in what makes each person unmistakably individual while also revealing what we share. A musician absorbed in his music, an athlete pursuing excellence, a worker absorbed in his craft, or a face carrying the history of a lifetime can tell us something about ourselves.

I often begin with research and observation. I want to know something about the person before I paint the person. Photographs, stories, cultural history, and personal experience become part of the process. I then combine realism with graphic abstraction, using color, texture, line, and composition to move beyond simple likeness. My goal is not merely to reproduce a face, but to suggest something of the life behind it.

This has led to my larger body of work, Faces of Humanity, an ongoing exploration of people from different cultures and circumstances and the experiences that connect us. We may speak different languages, practice different traditions, and live very different lives, yet we know love, loss, joy, ambition, struggle, curiosity, and belonging. 

I believe that is one of the enduring purposes of art: to help us look closely at another person and, for a moment, recognize something of ourselves.

My work today is the continuation of a journey that began with drawing, developed through architecture, and has ultimately brought me back to the human figure.

I paint people because every face carries a story, and because beneath our differences, there is a shared human story worth seeing.