courtesy photos
THOM ROBINSON
~ by Rachel Berenson Perry
Though Thom Robinson is best known for his artwork, he’ s a fellow whose skills are wideranging. A renaissance man of sorts, he’ s a carpenter, builder, former tool and die shop owner, designer, cook, gardener, father, grandpa, and mushroom hunter, in addition to being an artist. He’ s also anything but provincial. He’ s lived and / or worked throughout the USA before settling in Brown County. Raised in Flint, Michigan, Robinson joined the U. S. Navy in the early 1970s( toward the end of the Vietnam war) because he wanted to see the world. Instead, he was stationed in San Diego. Never one to complain, he served his time and planned to return to the upper Midwest.
But the small community of Bedford, Indiana, caught his fancy when he went there with his wife to visit her relatives. Robinson raised a son and daughter in Bedford, and now has a grandson and granddaughter. His wife, Pat, also has a son and daughter.
Renaissance Man
A skilled machinist, Robinson set up a tool and die company; a vocation that requires innovation. His capacity for inventing extremely precise designs combined with his skill at operating machine tools made for a thriving business. He became a respected prototype designer who was in demand by Westinghouse, Otis Elevator, and Cook Medical, to name a few clients.
Robinson’ s skill at imagining things in 3-D easily translates into creating oil paintings. He had been making art intermittently ever since taking classes at the Flint Institute of the Arts as a child and teenager. When Thom and Pat left Lawrence County to be closer to her job in Indianapolis, he took a studio at the Stutz Building to concentrate full-time on his artwork. But Brown County, where Robinson had been painting on and off since the 1990s, called to him.
Finding wooded acreage on Wychwood Drive across from an entrance to the Brown County State Park, he and Pat took the plunge and bought it. The conundrum for a man who can do almost anything,
56 Our Brown County • Sept./ Oct. 2024