Arvid_profile

Detroit produced the modern wine world’s most famous painter.

Thomas The Life & Times of

Arvid

Now he calls Atlanta home.

By Steve Stevens

If you’re driving to Napa Valley from Detroit, the directions are not very complicated. Drive west until you see Lake Michigan, then follow the coastline southwest to Interstate 80. After that, drive until you hit Utah.

You’re not supposed to go through Atlanta. But as Thomas Arvid can attest, that doesn’t mean you can’t get there from here.

All Images © 2000-2009 Thomas Arvid. All Rights Reserved.

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apa Valley’s deep connection to wine would later influence Arvid the painter, but in 1984, it was simply Arvid the man who journeyed from frigid Detroit to the heat of Atlanta. When he left the Wolverine State, he left everything. He left the city where he was born and raised. He left his family: grandparents, a mother, father, two brothers and a sister.

Most of his friends remained in Detroit.

Still, there was something he knew about his relationship with his hometown, something that turned out to have an enormous impact on the futures of both Arvid and Detroit. He knew it even then, maybe before anyone else. What he knew was that he was changing and growing.

Detroit was not.

“Really, the Detroit area was a one-industry town, and it was something I recog-

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Oil paintings by Thomas Arvid, from left to right: The Collection, Room to Breathe and Something Worth Celebrating.

nized even back then,” Arvid said. “It wasn’t going to be getting any better any time soon. I came down to Atlanta with a friend of mine and just fell in love with the city. It was young, alive, and it was growing.”

In Detroit, Arvid said, all of the best jobs were held by people with no intention of leaving them. “They were going to stay in that job forever. Until they died.”

Since then, the fortunes of the storied port city on the banks of the Detroit River and the young man who left it have decidedly diverged, and the difference could not be more dramatic. While Detroit struggles publicly and mightily to find its place in a new world economy, Arvid is enjoying the sort of success that he could only imagine as a young man who once sweated in press shops and painted signs for a living.

Now, he is a nationally recognized artist with an adoring and well-heeled clientele.

He travels on weekends to charm collectors and show his work to galleries and the general public. He is wined and dined in New York City. He jets to San Diego. He is a star

in Napa Valley. Many galleries have trouble keeping his paintings on the wall, earning him a luxurious home a few miles north of Atlanta that might turn many General Motors executives green with envy.

But success was never assured. In fact, when he brought his first paintings to a gallery in Napa, he thought wine art would be everywhere, that he’d find a flooded market. Instead, he found a gaping need.

“When I first went to Napa Valley with my paintings, I thought I’d find wine paintings in all the art galleries, but there wasn’t even one. Everybody painted vineyard scenes and clusters of grapes.”

On the contrary, Arvid, whose forte has been painting remarkably realistic still lifes with wine at their center, was an immediate success. “I left six paintings in the first gallery in Napa Valley, and they sold them all overnight. I mean, they never even made it to the wall.”

That success has afforded Arvid certain opportunities, especially when it comes to wine. Like trying the 1997 Harlan Estates,

“ I left six paintings in the first gallery in Napa Valley, and they sold them all overnight. I mean, they never even made it to the wall.”

– Thomas Arvid

which Arvid calls the best wine he’s ever tasted. Incidentally, critic Robert Parker called Harlan’s 1997 Cabernet-dominated Bordeaux blend “one of the greatest Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines I have ever tasted,” and awarded it 100 points, his highest rating.

“It’s not even fair to call that wine,” Arvid said. “I’ve tasted it several times since, just to see if it was really that good.” It always is, he said.

To some, it may seem strange that wine has played such a central role in the life of a man born into a blue-collar Detroit family.

In his 2008 film “Gran Torino,” Clint Eastwood plays a retired Detroit autoworker who quaffs Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and sprays racial epithets like bullets. With a

beat-up Detroit as a backdrop, wine picnics are nowhere to be seen.

Arvid’s father knows the automobile industry well; he worked as a foreman in a General Motors factory. All of Arvid’s siblings are still in Detroit. His older brother operates heavy equipment, and his younger brother works with vending machines and does custom welding. His sister works as a dental assistant. Neither art nor wine is prevalent in any of their professions, at least as they exist in Detroit. But to Arvid it all makes perfect sense.

“Now that I can look back at how it all happened, it’s really obvious,” he said.

“When you go to Napa Valley, you cherish it. The scenery, everything about it. But to the people who live in Napa Valley, it’s

just there. All the time, it’s a part of their everyday lives.

“I truly think it took someone not from Napa Valley to kind of capture how we cherish just a bottle of wine,” he said.

Perspective is an artist’s tool, and Arvid has used his to great effect. It took him out of a life that didn’t suit him and into one that did. Looking at one of Arvid’s paintings, someone might feel as if they’re looking at the world through the artist’s eyes, even if just for a few moments. The more you learn about the man, his work and his life, the more you realize how good a thing that actually is.

Steve Stevens is a writer and editor and has been covering wine since 2003.

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