Tom Gilleon is a painter whose career spans NASA, Disney, Montana ranchland, and the permanent collections of nearly every institution that matters in Western American art, a trajectory that is, simply, unlike anyone else's on the roster. Gilleon was born in Gainesville, Florida, raised by a Scottish grandfather and a Cherokee grandmother who gave him both a reverence for craft and a connection to Native culture. His first canvas was the white sand yard outside his door, drawn into with a stick. He later served in the Navy, then illustrated for NASA's Apollo and Saturn programs, work that led him to Disney, where he spent more than twenty-five years as an Imagineer contributing original design concepts for EPCOT Center and the Disneyland parks in Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Those years alongside some of the most accomplished visual storytellers in American history shaped what collector Patrick Hemingway called Gilleon's "magical elegance", a quality in the color and luminescence that is still visible on every canvas. In the early 1980s, Gilleon settled in Montana near the upper Missouri River on land Charlie Russell once roamed. Russell's horse wintered in the same barn where Gilleon's horse rests today. He ranches Black Angus cattle and, by most accounts, is making the finest work of his life. The work is held in permanent collections at the Whitney Western Art Museum, the C.M. Russell Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, the Scottsdale Museum of the West, the Booth Museum of Western Art, and the Walt Disney Company, among others. He was the first living artist to receive a solo exhibition at the C.M. Russell Museum and is a founding member of its Skull Society of Artists. Gilleon has also pushed into new territory. With a fellow former Disney Imagineer, he co-created PIXoils™, a digital platform that transforms his oil paintings into large-format moving works with sound, the paintings themselves shifting in front of the viewer. In 2024, Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West mounted Inner Light: The Art of Tom Gilleon, a 90-painting career retrospective spanning more than seventy years, including the world premiere of Spirit Catcher, a twenty-two-minute PIXoils™ triptych. A PBS documentary, The Art of Tom Gilleon, followed in 2025. Tom Gilleon joined Cassens Fine Art in 2025. The relationship began with Gilleon reaching out to the gallery. "Tom is not an artist who partners casually," says Michelle Cassens, Owner and Director. "He is an artist whose career spans NASA, Walt Disney Imagineering, and five decades of fine art at the highest level. Being chosen as a representative of his work confirmed the direction we were already heading." Gilleon represents the standard the gallery holds itself to: an artist with deep roots in the Western tradition and a body of work that continues to grow.