Faces
It’s all about the face—the face as representative of identity and loss of it. You see each of them fighting for attention in his busiest, more heated work—when he’s in that fever and they all peek their noses out to be seen. A mass of them—but no confusion. I imagine it’s how a particularly harassed medium must feel—all of those presences vying for attention as the séance is about to begin. But somehow, some way, out of the hustle bustle, there’s coherence of multiple identity…
Then the single faces, the portraits he paints where one identity has grabbed him for that few moments it takes him to put the paint down. Peering out of the fog, lit up by sunlight, hiding but wanting to be seen…
And all these faces—is it just me or do I see Tommy’s high cheek bones in them? Self portraits of all the other quantum selves that flash through the perpetual motion machine that is Tommy’s creativity…
Alien landscapes
Over coffee recently Tommy told me it sometimes felt like he was walking through this life as if it's a constanty changing alien landscape. And that's part of the artistic experience I suppose. Always observing, always mystical and anthropological—looking at the inner and the outer play of consciousness and actions coming and going and making of them what you will. I experience this to some degree. But with Tommy and his scuffle with death and the unleashing of his creative genie, unarbitered and free—with Tommy this experience is intense and frighteningly out of control. I don't know how he copes. But he does—as long as there's a brush and paint to magic the intensity away, or a lump of stone to carve...
