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

Tom, appreciate you joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

This is more of an aspiration, rather than reality. I’ve been working creatively for most of my adult life, but I’ve never been able to make a full-time living at it (at least not yet). Prior to the lockdowns things have looked as though I was on the verge. I was having shows, work was selling, things were looking up. The road back to whatever ‘normal’ is or was, has been difficult. I work a full-time job, which means I don’t have much time for painting and writing. Bills and rent have to be paid. I’ve had a small taste of what full-time creative work could be and it felt good. But I consider what I do professionally to be creative, even if it means commuting and sitting in an office for a while. Anything that makes me money so I can keep the lights on in the studio is part of the creative process. I believe that it is the struggle of daily life that makes the creative work that much more interesting and compelling, because it speaks to the existential realities we all confront.

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’ve been an artist for many years. How I got into the business is not always clear. I started by doing, making things, painting and having shows wherever I could – coffee shops, homes, hair salons, and eventually real galleries and museums. There is a real disconnect in how an artist’s career ‘should’ go and how it actually happens. The world of art isn’t the same as it was in the 1990s and early 2000s. Back then one could still go get an MFA and have some kind of a guarantee, however small that guarantee was, that one could have a career after graduating. That world disappeared in the last ten years or so, or it has changed so much that it’s virtually unrecognizable. My trajectory took much of that into account, but I still eventually ended up getting an MFA, because it is still one of the few things that validates an artist’s career. But because I was already a working semi-professional artist before that, I had a completely different experience of the program. I used it as a springboard, learned and experimented as much as I could, and then put all that away and began making work that was almost the opposite of what I was doing before and during the MFA. I got rid of all color and started painting with only white water mixable oil paint and ash on burned wood, effectively reversing the process of drawing. Instead of going from white to black, I started painting from black to white. I feel like I’ve finally arrived at my ‘style’. It’s recognizable and it does all the things that I want it to do. This is one of the hardest things to explain, but if one looks at any historically important artist and the works by which they’re recognized, what isn’t immediately apparent is that it took them many years of trial and error and outright failure to get to that point. I’m not saying that what I make now is my final style, but it’s a good start. It feels good. Each painting is one more idea that needed to get out and find an expression.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Yes, but I’m only vaguely aware of what that is. I believe that one does not choose to be an artist, one simply IS an artist. One can still become an artist later in life, but I would still argue that this becoming is already ontologically determined. Even if you become at artist at 80, you were already always an artist since the very beginning. This is important because the mission is part of that personal ontology. My mission, if I was to boil it down, is awareness, especially of the shadow side. Some would call this the dark side of humanity, I prefer to stick with the Jungian shadow. But awareness doesn’t mean endorsment, that’s a very important distinction. Understanding the shadow side is a way to begin to understand oneself, and through my work I am really analyzing and trying to understand myself and the world around me. I think of art as direct action philosophy.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think that many people who aren’t artists often think of artists as navegazing narcissistic idiots. They may not understand a work of art and believe that because they do not understand it that others also don’t or shouldn’t understand it. They may not understand the reason for its existence or scoff at the way it looks. There is a deep lesson here and it took me many years to realize that there even was a lesson to begin with. That lesson is the importance of subjectivity. Simply put, we’re all engaged in creating our own world individually and everything we do as individuals is reflected in our daily activity, whether we’re cooking, writing books, or building rockets that will one day fly toward Mars. We are all making some kind of work and that work is about ourselves. The self is the most powerful influence in our lives, greater than politics or art. A work of great historical significance, or a scientific achievement, all goes back to the self. To think of this influence in this way is to realize that even the most objective historical point of view is written through a point of view, thus a historian writing an objective history of the United States for example is writing about herself writing about US history. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we might realize that the idea of competition is absolutely insane. We’re all individual selves finding our way through life. Our very difference means that we’re never in direct competition with anyone else, despite what all modern day captains of industry and Social Darwinists want us to believe. My journey and my work is my own and it is so different from anyone else’s that I cannot be by definition competing with anyone else. So I no longer look at my work as a struggle, but as a thing to do, a thing I must do, because no one else can do it for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.tompazderka.com
• Instagram: @tompazderka

Image Credits
Tom Pazderka