We were lucky to catch up with John Patrick Thomas recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, John Patrick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

In 2023 I was invited to create three murals for Google’s Artist in Residence program. The murals were commissioned to celebrate the opening of their new Cafe and Community Spaces, the first locations on the campus that are entirely open to the public to visit and enjoy. It was great collaborating with the Google food team to learn about the thinking behind the food they serve, the ingredients they source and the cafe visitors who will use the space. I have a personal love of cooking, gardening, fishing, foraging and sharing food with friends, so creating a series of murals that not only celebrates shared meals but also centers the workers and labor behind them was meaningful.

The initial designs for the murals were created by filling my sketchbook with individual drawings of moments from the grocery store, roadside fruit signs, agricultural landscapes, and friends enjoying good food together. It was a fun process to design and a lot of work to paint over the 3 week residency, but in the end it was a very personal and gratifying project to work on.

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?

My name is John Patrick Thomas (JT) and my studio is based in Oakland, California. I’ve been working full-time in various creative industries focused around drawing, painting and design for 11 years. All of my artwork from small editorial illustrations to large murals begin in my sketchbooks crammed with pages of drawings, sometimes random and sometimes organized, usually picking apart one subject or idea in as many ways as I can.

I originally began working in editorial illustration for newspapers, magazines and online publications, which tend to be conceptual visual ideas with quick turn around times. That work really trained my thinking and drawing ability for future roles I would find in other creative markets. After moving to Oakland in 2014, I worked at the Facebook Analog Research Lab which was an art studio offshoot of the Artist in Residence Program, now known as Meta Open Arts. We would propose art projects to excite and engage the internal culture on the campus, design and screen print posters, and host workshops and events for employees to have access to art at work.

After leaving Facebook, I joined the Art and Graphics team at WeWork where our small team was in charge of painting, drawing, curating and commissioning all of the artwork for WeWork co-working offices across the western US, from Austin to SF and Vancouver to LA. Collaborating with interior designers, local artists and neon fabricators our team would fill hundreds of blank walls every month with original paintings, photography and special art moments to create a balanced sense of curated art. This work got me interested in how art can transform a physical space, tell powerful stories, and reflect the community it’s located in. Since then I’ve been drawn to public art commissions and creating murals for businesses to help them tell their own stories in their spaces.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I love the act of researching deep into subjects, drawing on personal memories and observations, playing with universal symbols we use to communicate, and creating drawings that somehow seem to be entirely new but also feel like they’re an endless continuation of our collective visual language. There’s a process within it all that feels extremely personal and introspective, but at the same time ultimately made to share with others. That act of collaboration between the artist and viewer, whether it’s a stranger, a client or your friend, is extremely rewarding.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

While studying illustration in school, I learned too seriously what “finished” artwork looked like, as well as the process to get there from rough sketch to shiny final. The initial first drawings, full of exciting potential, felt beaten down by the end of that formulaic process. Through the years, I’ve found more inspiration from fine art than commercial art and learned there is not only a lot of perfectionism and control to unlearn, but an incredibly exciting freedom to experiment and make yourself laugh out loud. I would leave people with the encouragement to go create exactly what represents themselves and excites them, whether it’s framing a silly doodle of their dog or painting a beautiful masterpiece.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.johnpatrickthomas.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hellojthomas/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-patrick-thomas/