Tom Savage  (b.1953 - 2018) Was a contemporary American painter based in California whose work appears in museum collections and has been exhibited in major cities throughout the United States. 

"My work takes an historical cue from post-war European Automatism and Surrealism, and the powerful influence those movements had on what's now called Abstract Expressionism. At the same time, I've always been fond of the directness and beauty seen in early Japanese and Chinese ink works. So it's really the physical and poetic qualities of abstraction that I love and try to practice daily. That said, I have always enjoyed the risk of starting a painting or drawing with what at first may appear to be formless, only to realize a kind of trigger, or glimpse into my own thoughts and day-to-day experiences. Once that happens, I take the work to a formal stage; shaping the piece into a visual narrative which might include landscape, organic forms, or personal symbols, such as eyes, walls, teeth—the list goes on and on—references that makes some sense to me and hopefully the viewer.

For the past few years, I've been working with the delicate balance which painting and drawing share when given varying degrees of emphasis. In most of my paintings I use a combination of acrylic, oil, and drawing media simultaneously to lead the viewer into a new place of visual poetics."

In his Los Angeles Times review of Savage's 1995 solo exhibition at the Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, renowned LA Time critic David Pagel described the Tom's works as "raw, incoherent, precarious and daring. At the same time, they're confident and desperate, riddled with deep doubts but also profoundly self-assured."