Artist, gallery president survives pandemic with engineering mindset
Daniel Kim / The Seattle Times
The nature of an engineer is to step up to a challenge, says Seattle artist Earnest D. Thomas, and he is a prime example.
An engineer by trade who retired from Boeing in 2003, Thomas is now a painter by passion. He’s also the president of the Seattle-based Onyx Fine Arts Collective, though he’s never taken an art class.
Armed with an engineer’s willingness to persevere, Thomas has accomplished many things; most recently, being an artist during a pandemic. After Pacific Place mall, where Gallery Onyx is located, shut down for four months in 2020, Thomas said the gallery was a month away from permanently closing its doors when things started turning around.
“One might think that the pandemic would kind of give an artist a lot of time to do more creating,” he said. “Well, it didn’t work that way for me because of this nonprofit arts organization that I’m president of. It caused us to hustle a lot more.”
