Thomas Lawson (born 1951, Glasgow, Scotland) is an artist, writer, magazine editor, and Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts. He emerged as a central figure in ideological debates at the turn of the 1980s about the viability of painting through critical essays, such as "Last Exit: Painting" (1981), and as one of the artists in the loosely defined "Pictures Generation" group. He has been described as "an embedded correspondent [and] polemical editorialist" who articulated an oppositional, progressive position for representational painting from within an increasingly reactionary art and media environment. Artforum called his approach to the medium "one of the most cogent and controversial" in the 80s.