We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gary Thomas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Gary, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I’ve always wanted to be an artist. To live the life of an artist and have my art generate what I needed to live. My problem early on is I didn’t know how to do that. I recoiled from the business side and didn’t pursue the knowledge and skills I needed as a young artist to have any level of success or ability to sustain that.
Due to this I floundered. Looking back now I was what I think society saw me and other artist as, a starving artist. I scraped and scratched trying to maintain some sort of life that included painting. I had some serious obstacles to overcome, drinking and drugs being the biggest. I kept telling myself that living in the fringes walking a tight-rope with complete ruin on one side and some monicker of success on the other was the type of experience I needed to be successful as an artist.
Of course I eventually crashed and burned. I had some success in Seattle in my early thirties. I was selling and I was a board member with COCA, Center On Contemporary Art. Again, living on the edge I eventually crashed and burned.
Before I knew it I was living in Hawaii and having a kid. There were so many voices telling me art couldn’t support my family. These same voices gave me the roadmap to a prescriptive life.
Many years went by thinking and dreaming of making art with very little production, then Covid happened.
I was a corporate VP living in CO when Covid hit. The company I worked for closed the Colorado market and we all lost our jobs; best thing that ever happened to me. After the weird shock of the lockdown I decided it was time to live the life I believe I was meant to live. A life of creating and sharing and selling my work.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’ve always felt that I needed to express something from within; for most of my life I couldn’t articulate what that is. It’s a feeling, or force that drives me to create. In turn when I’m creating/painting I get respite from whatever the thing is pushing me or pushing on me.

I paint, I create as the best answer I have for, what I’ve only recently been able to identify, the traumas I’ve suffered. There’s the trauma inflicted on me by others as a child, and the trauma I have inflicted upon myself. One is more deep-seated than the other, but both provide me with meaning and direction; I have tea with my shadow almost daily.

This getting to know my shadow has opened me up to experience the trauma that’s all around. All the dark I see around me is somehow translated into cynicism, sarcastic dark humor. Much of my work is a representation of that in one way or another. A joke I keep telling myself about my experience of and in this world we all live.

I don’t know if this sets me apart or make me the same as everyone else. I’m both a megalomaniac and insecure. I’m angry and sad with vision of a wide range of human experience. I know what’s going and am compellingly stupid at the same time. This duality is where I live everyday.

Now I’m in my early 50’s and I’m possessed with the need to create daily. I have lost so much time trying to lead a lifestyle prescribed by others. So many pieces that were never born. I mourn that whole looking at that truth everyday and allowing it to keep pouring out of me.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I’m not interested in NFTs. I believe the idea of them is corruptive. They had their 15 minutes for sure and some people really capitalized on that novelty.

I looked at them, thought about minting some of my work. As I went through that process, which is pretty shady, it became clear to me that NFTs an best exist to shelter money and at worst are used to launder money. My experience as I is believes the latter is more true.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

The mission that drives my journey I believe has been around forever and is two-fold. First, I have something inside me pushing from within that I am obligated to express or possibly be destroyed it. Second, as I visit the reality of my mortality, I know my work will live on in one way or another. As long as my work exists, I exist. Doesn’t matter if I am understood as an obscure figure or if my work achieves some level of renown, I will exist through my paintings.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.Tinyurl.com/gktexpressionism
• Instagram: @garykthomasjr
• Other: Www. Garykthomas-art.square.site

Image Credits

None