ARTIST’S STATEMENT Creativity is a human endeavor with virtually no limits. I am an artist because I find joyful challenge in expressing the uniqueness in my soul. It is natural and rewarding to share my excitement and pass on practical skills to children. Children are mortals who are particularly adaptive to change and to personal vision, expressed in art. The essential goal of art is to bring forth our inner feelings and dreams and to share with others. Thomas Freese, artist

THOMAS FREESE has studied arts and crafts since 1976 in various locales, including the Southwest Craft Center and the McNay Art Institute in San Antonio, TX and El Tecnologico de Estudios Superiores de Nuevo Leon in Mexico. Thomas also spent 11 years in New Mexico, where he became familiar with Native American art and culture. He has mastered a variety of crafts, including calligraphy, eraser carving, rubber stamp design, and jewelry making, and offers classes for schools in jewelry making, printing, Native American crafts and culture, the art of rubber stamping, and Spanish and Mexican folk-art crafts.

For Art On-Air, he shows students how to make a tessellating stamp and how to make an accordion-fold book.

Designer of Rubber Stamps:
Critter #1 ©1995, Thomas Freese
hand-carved rubber stamp

Wood Carver and Book Illustrator

Craftsman (with a wonderful line of wooden jewelry)

Teacher’s Guide for Tessellations
Teacher’s Guide for Bookmaking

Other Instructional Television Resources

• Math Vantage Program 4, “Tessellations/Transformations”

Related Links

• Student artwork
• Tessellations
  • Tessellation lesson plans
  • Student tessellations from Frisbie Middle School, Rialto, CA and Waiau Elementary School, Pearl City, HI
  • M.C. Escher: Life and Work shows the National Gallery of Art’s holdings of the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelius Escher (1898-1972).
• Bookmaking
  • The Paper, Art, and the Book exhibit at the Center for Book Arts Gallery in New York reveals the innovative ways artists use paper to express the ideas of books and broadsides.
  • Book Arts Gallery links to numerous book art exhibits on the Internet.
  • The Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking in Atlanta, GA is a renowned resource on the history of paper and paper technology. Take a virtual tour of the museum and learn how paper is made.

Contact Thomas Freese through the Kentucky Arts Council: (502) 564-3757