Four Paintings
About Thad DeVassie
Thad DeVassie is a writer and artist/painter from Ohio. His artwork has appeared in galleries and juried exhibitions across the US, as well as on the covers and in the pages of Salt Hill, Phoebe, Bat City Review, New Ohio Review, Pithead Chapel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Random Sample, Permafrost, and others. He is the author three chapbook collections and was awarded the James Tate Poetry Prize. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2025. His novelette-in-flash is forthcoming in late 2026. Find more of his creative output at www.thaddevassie.com.
Editor’s Statement
Thad DeVassie’s paintings demonstrate a mastery of subtle color and texture, evoking sweeping scenes with a few strokes of the brush or palette knife. Each of his compositions centers a landscape with a different degree of human infrastructure. Our presence is most prominent in “A Nostalgia We Have Never Known,” where a row of buildings dominates the horizon like paperweights straight across the center of the painting. In “Field Early Spring,” that presence lifts from the ground, reduced to a set of electric lines slicing the clouds. Finally, we fade to nothing at all in the simple yet expressive “Obsidian.” Of course, that’s just my interpretation: one could easily rearrange the paintings to replace the narrative of retreat with one of growing encroachment.
—Karie Luidens, Visual Arts Editor