Daily Inspiration: Meet Tom Burns

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tom Burns.

Hi Tom, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
For more than two decades, artist Tom Burns has built a life out of color, texture, and intuition. Known for his large-scale, multi-layered oil paintings—works that feel excavated as much as painted—Burns has long explored the emotional sediment of memory, place, and identity. His Palm Springs gallery and studio have become a creative anchor in the desert: a space where he not only makes art, but invites community, dialogue, and the blur between process and finished work.
But in recent years, another story began pressing forward—one not made of oil and canvas, but of people, secrets, and the quiet courage it takes to live a truthful life. That story became Under Cover Up, Burns’s debut novel, and the beginning of an unexpected new chapter in his creative career.
“I never planned to be a writer,” Burns says. “I just thought in color. But one day I realized I had a story to tell—something I couldn’t express through paint alone.”
What began as a few notes on a phone became a full manuscript, a romantic suspense novel that explores family legacy, hidden identities, and the complicated ways love takes shape under pressure. And although the medium was new, Burns found himself slipping into familiar rhythms.
“In painting, I build layers—glazes, scraped-back passages, textures that reveal and hide at the same time,” he explains. “Writing surprised me because I was doing the same thing. Only instead of paint, the layers were backstory, emotion, pacing, and the inner lives of the characters. The tools were different, but the instinct was the same.”
Where painting gave him instant visual feedback, writing demanded patience. Draft after draft became its own kind of studio practice: long hours, revisions, edits, and the strange dance between vision and execution that every artist knows intimately.
“Painting is solitary, but writing is something else entirely,” he says. “It’s like you’re alone with fifty different versions of the same character arguing for attention. It challenged me in ways I didn’t expect.”
Yet Burns embraced the challenge. He wrote early in the mornings before stepping into his studio, wrote during quiet hours in his gallery, wrote on airplanes and between art openings. Gradually, Under Cover Up revealed itself—a story as layered and textured as his canvases.
Now, with his first novel published and a second already underway, Burns finds himself at an intersection of disciplines. Painting still feeds his soul, but writing has opened a new channel—one that adds depth, narrative, and emotional resonance to the way he sees the world.
“Whether it’s a canvas or a chapter, I’m always trying to uncover something,” he says. “Not just what’s on the surface, but what’s underneath—the part people carry quietly.”
For Burns, this evolution isn’t a pivot; it’s a continuation. A widening. A deeper excavation of the same impulse that has always driven him: the desire to build a world, layer by layer, until something true emerges.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
“There have been a few surprises along the way,” Burns admits with a laugh. “I honestly didn’t expect to feel the same creative release from writing that I get from painting. Painting has always been my home base—my oxygen. So discovering that writing could tap into that same emotional circuitry was… well, a pleasant shock.”

“Writing turned out to be a different kind of creative challenge, but strangely familiar at the same time. In my artwork, I’m always wrestling with balance—color against texture, chaos against structure, what to reveal and what to bury in the layers. When I started writing, I realized the challenge of balance never went away. It just shifted.”
Burns draws a parallel between brushstrokes and sentences, between layers of paint and layers of narrative.
“With writing, the balancing act happens with words,” he explains. “Every sentence has weight. Every paragraph changes the rhythm. You’re choosing what to highlight, what to whisper, and what to hold back for later. It’s still composition—just in a different medium.”

“I think that’s what surprised me the most. I wasn’t abandoning my artistic instincts to write a novel. I was using the same instincts, just translated into language. The tools changed, but the creative process—building, adjusting, feeling your way through—felt remarkably similar.”

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Under Cover Up: A Love Story Caught Between Loyalty and the Law
Under Cover Up is a bold, emotionally layered novel that braids together love, identity, and secrecy against a backdrop of power, scandal, and family loyalties.
Inspired by a real-life relationship and set in the high-stakes worlds of East Coast finance and organized crime, the story follows the unlikely romance between Dashiell Ledger—the son of the FBI’s Boston Director—and Marco Morelli, the charismatic heir to a traditional Italian-American family with long-whispered ties to the mafia. What begins as a private, exhilarating connection soon collides with public scrutiny and inherited expectations.
When their relationship is thrust into the spotlight, the fallout is swift and unforgiving. Under the glare of the media and mounting pressure from both families, Dash and Marco must decide whether to protect their reputations or risk everything for a love that could dismantle the worlds they were born to uphold. As secrets surface and loyalties are tested, the men confront a single, searing question: What is the price of living—and loving—openly?
With razor-sharp dialogue, vivid atmosphere, and a propulsive plot, Under Cover Up brings a fresh, heartfelt voice to contemporary LGBTQ+ fiction. The novel captures the breathless intensity of a clandestine affair as it strains against the boundaries of legacy, duty, and public judgment—delivering a story that is at once intimate and sweeping.
“What happens when the FBI falls in love with the mafia?” asks Burns. “Under Cover Up is about impossible choices, family loyalty, and the magnetic pull of forbidden love—and the courage it takes to make yourself visible when invisibility feels safer.”
About the Novel
Under Cover Up is a smart, timely, and emotionally resonant exploration of identity, desire, and the consequences of secrets—both the ones we keep and the ones kept for us. As Dash and Marco navigate the intricate politics of their families and careers, they discover that truth can be both a weapon and a lifeline. With empathy, humor, and cinematic pacing, the novel confronts the costs of silence and the transformative power of authenticity.

Any big plans?
Looking ahead, Burns shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, he’s already deep into his second novel, Lost in L.A., a story that brings him even closer to home—both geographically and artistically.
“People always say, ‘Write what you know,’” Burns says with a grin. “So… I took that pretty literally.”
Lost in L.A. follows a Palm Springs–based artist who unexpectedly falls for one of Hollywood’s most bankable A-list actors—a man whose fame, image, and obligations collide head-on with the simplicity and sincerity of desert life. The tension between the quiet authenticity of the art world and the relentless spotlight of celebrity culture becomes the emotional spine of the novel.
What many readers might not realize is that the seed for the story didn’t begin on the page at all. It began on a canvas.
“Part of the inspiration actually came from a painting I did years ago, titled Lost in L.A.,” Burns explains. “It hangs in my gallery today. The piece explores that feeling of disorientation—of being swallowed by the energy of Los Angeles, but also being strangely drawn to it. I kept having to explain the painting when people come into the gallery. Now I am giving it a story.”
That painting—layered, moody, and infused with both glamour and distance—became the aesthetic heartbeat of the new novel. From its color palette to its emotional tension, Lost in L.A. continues Burns’s signature interplay between the visual and the narrative arts. Just as his debut novel mirrored the layered construction of his paintings, his sophomore work emerges directly from the artwork itself.
“It’s the same creative impulse,” he says. “I build meaning in layers. I scrape back, I rewrite, I rework. Whether it’s oil paint or a chapter draft, the process is surprisingly similar. The story finds its shape the same way a painting does—slowly, through instinct and revision.”
With Under Cover Up now out in the world and Lost in L.A. taking shape, Burns sees his writing and painting as parallel paths—distinct but intertwined, each one deepening the other.
“I feel like I’ve opened a new channel,” he says. “And now that it’s open, all I want to do is keep creating—on the page, on the canvas, wherever the stories lead.”

Pricing:

• $14.98 https://www.amazon.com/Under-Cover-Up-Tom-Burns/dp/B0FPTDPZ6F/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0
• $24.44 https://www.amazon.com/Under-Cover-Up-Tom-Burns/dp/B0FSY2WKF8/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0
• $4.99 https://www.amazon.com/Under-Cover-Up-Tom-Burns-ebook/dp/B0FPXMC41X/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artoftb/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomas.burns.71/
• Other: https://www.amazon.com/Under-Cover-Up-Tom-Burns/dp/B0FPTDPZ6F/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

Image Credits
The professional portrait image was taken by. Marc Olivier Le Blanc. The other images of me and paintings I took. No credit necessary for mine.