Anton Thomas
Wild World
28 September – 29 October 2023
Exhibition Preview Thursday 28 September 6-8pm
Exhibition Opening Thursday 5 October 6-8pm
After an astronomical THREE YEARS of drawing, Fox Galleries is proud to announce our presentation of Anton Thomas’ now completed map of the ‘Wild World’.
Anton Thomas is an artist-cartographer based in Melbourne. From his childhood in New Zealand’s South Island to the present day, he has been enchanted by geography, exploring its confluence with
art via hand-crafted maps.
His maps are drawn with coloured pencil and fine-liner pen. They are astonishingly detailed, sometimes needing thousands of hours of research and drawing to complete. He believes the most emotive maps are those that evoke a sense of place, that see a location not just by its topography and hydrography, but by what it feels like to be there. By the colours, sounds, and lifeforms – animal or human – that inhabit it.
Due to his unique hand-drawn approach and themes around biodiversity, Anton Thomas’ aesthetic, functional and educational maps have gathered a global reputation through conference presentations and his uncanny ability to turn geography into exquisite art.
Please find a full catalogue here.
P R E S S
2023 MapLab: Drawing the Wild World – Bloomberg/CityLab.
2022 Meet the map artist, two years into a global quest – Seven Sharp TVNZ.
2021 Making maps with Anton Thomas – Radio New Zealand.
2021 How I Made This: Anton Thomas’s Pictorial Maps – ARTnews.
2021 A Cartographer’s 5-Year Journey – Blazepress.
2020 What to Cook this Week – New York Times.
2020 Wild World: a Hand-Drawn Geographic Map of the Earth – Kottke.
2020 Hand-drawing the World – Show & Tell video – Atlas Obscura.
2020 Check out this incredible hand-drawn map of North America – Lonely Planet.
2020 Interview with Kim Hill on Saturday Morning – Radio New Zealand.
2020 Interview: Artist Spends 5 Years Drawing Giant Colored Pencil Map of North America – My Modern Met.
2019 How a Cartographer Drew a Massive, Freehand Map of North America– Atlas Obscura.
2019 Science Tour of the United States(contract artwork) – The Washington Post.
2018 All Over the Map(book, pages 302-305) – National Geographic.
2018 4,000 Hours of North America– CityLab.
2018 Cartography.(book, pages 82-83) – Kenneth Field, Esri.
2016 The Best Maps of 2016– National Geographic, All Over the Map Blog.
2016 Atlas of Design Vol. III – North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS).
2017-2019 Various NACIS conference videos
