John Paul Thomas (4 February 1927, Bessemer, Alabama – 5 September 2001, Honolulu, Hawaii) was an American artist specializing in oil painting, watercolor and drawing in several media.

He moved to the Kona District of Hawaii Island in 1970 where he worked for thirty-one years until his death due to complications from myasthenia gravis.

He occupied the Ames Walker Professorship Chair in the School of Art at the University of Washington, Seattle (1968-1969).

His "Homage to Gaea", which occupied the last fifteen years of his life, combined bold color-shapes of tropical foliage with a technique of painting that reflected back to his abstract expressionist youth.

Excerpts were released on Varèse Sarabande LP in 1980 and the complete work on Albany Records SACD (1994) with Thomas paintings reproduced on the covers.

1 painting "Rainbow Birth" was chosen for the cover of the Brubeck-LaVergne Trio jazz LP "See How It Feels".

[10] While his peers were throwing off the trappings of previous conventions, Thomas was developing a system of grids to control the interplay between the two-dimensional surface of a painting and a symbolic third dimension within.

[5]: Foreword 2, 14–17, 22–35  He traced the source of the concept to his early studies of Italian Renaissance painters and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, several of whose students were close personal friends.