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

Isaac, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?

I feel my work has been misunderstood before. Part of what I do is performance poetry. My writing is expressive and emotional but not always literal. Years ago I performed a piece filled with colors and what seemed like sexually charged scenarios. After the event was over, a few people came to me expressing their concern for my emotional health and felt I should seek counseling. I tried to explain that I express myself using metaphors and that my written and visual work can not always be taken literally. I learned that people will make their own interpretation and stopped attempting to explain my work.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I began drawing when I was about six years old or so. Cartoons and comics fascinated me. My grandmother would give me the comic strips from the Sunday newspaper. I would draw my own versions of Transformers cartoons in notebook paper. Eventually I began creating my own stories finding inspiration in movies, music, poetry, and dreams. After graduating college I worked in advertising for a short while. The agency I worked for was bought out and I was let go in the transition. I began as a substitute teacher with the plan of going back to advertising but here I am twenty years later teaching in public education.

I would say that I’m most satisfied or happy when a student reacts to a process we’ve done in class and uses it to continue to express their own voice or they find excitement in being introduced to an artist or art career they didn’t realize could be a a path for them.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Resources I wish I had known about when I started taking art classes in college would be professionals in areas of music. Music and sound are such strong inspirations for me, I wish I had studied them academically so that I could better marry imagery and sound. I think if I had studied music I would probably have released a couple of music albums by now.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I think the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is being able to play in my imagination and express the weird and unusual or unconventional.

Contact Info:

• Other: Isaact7.wix.com/the-eye-site