American artist Thomas E. Breitenbach (Born 1951) was born in Queens, New York. He’s a self-taught artist widely known for his painting Proverbidioms, a comical and raucous painting that depicts over 300 common clichés and proverbs. Shortly before Jim Morrison's death Breitenbach collaborated with him on a painting that was intended for use on his An American Prayer album. Breitenbach works in several mediums, and has written a book of painting secrets, an illustrated fantasy novel, a Proverbidioms trivia book, composed film music, designed fonts, and written musicals, including a partly autobiographical story about Hieronymus Bosch, a medieval fantasy artist and his over-active imagination. Breitenbach studied fine arts and architecture at the University of Notre Dame (in an independent study program). He later moved to Italy, where he became the youngest person to receive the Rome Prize Fellowship in visual arts.
Breitenbach art was inspired by the museums and castles of Europe, so when he returned home he was determined to build a castle-studio to house his art and he was planning to eventually turn it into a museum. His earliest works are dark symbolism stimulated by his vision of human’s nature as being violent and hopelessly irrational. Breitenbach's subjects, influenced by Carl Jung, are intended to provoke strong emotional responses from the observer and are constructed using archetypal symbols. In 1973, Breitenbach was awarded the Rome Prize, in the visual arts category, by the Society of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome. Breitenbach emphasizes that his paintings are not surrealism, because surrealism employs the use dream and personal symbols which he considers as not being an effective form of language.
