In a career spanning four decades, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist David Thomas has built a visual language that punctuates colour theory, monochromatic painting, installation, and photo-painting with decidedly humanistic and poetic gestures. While positioned firmly in abstraction, his practice has decidedly personal underpinnings, exploring notions of contemplation, perceptions of time and space, complexity, impermanence, knowing, and feeling. Art history, the studio, the home, and life outside of them fold in on one another with a quiet sensitivity, humour, and poignancy.

Made in close cooperation with longtime friend and creative collaborator, graphic designer Stuart Geddes, Thomas's latest book Amid is a quietly unabashed meander through Thomas's world. Here, painting, photography, and text juxtapose, oscillate, and in time, become a composite. He creates a space where, as he puts it, 'simple complexities' alter our reading of the gestures at hand – monochrome paintings, humorous observations, titles, and photographs of family, public happenstance, and his dog Jimmy, echo and coalesce.

As Thomas writes, 'This publication is a celebration of the complexity of art, life, and of the wonder of simple things, [It is a] book, to paraphrase the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, of "subtleties and tolerances". [It] offers a space/time for musing … when we muse, we don't have to conclude but can accept what is there in all its openness.'