Thomas DeVany Forrestall, C.M., O.N.S., B.F.A. LL.D., RCA was born in Middleton Nova Scotia, in 1936. Forrestall's family later moved to Dartmouth which allowed him to attend Saturday morning art classes at the Nova Scotia College of Art in Halifax. In 1954, he was awarded a scholarship to the Fine Arts department at Mount Allison University, where he studied with Lawren P. Harris and Alex Colville. He has been a freelance artist since 1960. Forrestall's art has been classified as Magic Realism - an imprecise term often used to describe the work of a coterie of east-coast Canadian painters who emerged after the Second World War (Alex Colville, Christopher Pratt, Mary Pratt). Although their geographic roots, styles and vocabularies were similar, these artists applied themselves differently, each adapting naturalism in a personal way.