Evan Thomas

I ditched art about fifteen years back and I was pretty sure it was for good. The reason was music. I was playing blues and R and B mostly and having a good time. I was not having fun with my art. It was too labored, studied and let's not feign false disinterest, it was not selling. A friend said he had done the same thing only to humbly come back to art. And humbly, I did make it back. I had no ambitions to impress anyone, I just wanted to get through 12-Step meetings by drawing on my iPad like others who do knitting instead. Besides enjoying doing art after two years or so I had a decent backlog that so far only Facebook friends had seen.

David Hockney's adoption of new technologies such as faxed composites, copy machine prints and assembled Polaroids got me to start drawing on a Nokia handheld computer. I wasn't surprised when I saw that he was using his iPhone and iPad to create images. The iPad drawings are done with my fingers or a stylus. But someetimes I start with a photo of a pen and paper drawing and paint over it. My studio costs are low, real low, since my iTouch can fit in almost all of my pockets, and my iPad Mini can sometimes fit in a pocket.

Giclee prints of my digital drawings are original works of art - exactly the same as prints from a lithographic stone. Digital works can be saved at almost infinite stages of a piece's development, and the mistakes and goofs go away with a revert to an earlier save. The earlier iterations of a work might feel as good or as interesting as the finished product. I can also assemble iterations alongside one another.

When I started doing digital art I had no plan to show or sell. Because I had no commercial ambitions, by accident I had been a Platonic liberal artist free of commercial ambitions since I had none. It wasn't until I got hip to Giclee printing that selling art seemed possible.

Whether they buy my art or not, and I prefer the former, I want people to like my my work without difficulty. If you want to plow deeper and knowledgeably catch French Classicism, comic book artificacts and whatever else that might be in my work, go for it. But paying reverence to that while looking at my art strikes me as weird. That's what religions are for.

I let style take care of itself and don't attempt to fashion one. I grab ahold of any cheap trick that might make a piece work or at least get it finished. I like mixing styles and mannerisms in the same piece - like Picasso liked to do, mainly since it gives me more ways to get a piece finished. That's why I might put compressed spaces next to cubical spaces, or give shadows to flattened shapes. What I do is throw a bunch of mud against the wall. What sticks is what you get.

Evan Thomas' art on the Web

Evan Thomas' AutoGallery exhibit