Today we’d like to introduce you to Thomas Whittaker Kidd.
Hi Thomas, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hello.
I moved to LA in 1999 in order to be in a larger contemporary art community than my previous studio locations, in Boston and the San Francisco Bay area. I love how the LA art community seems to noticeably change and develop more every 5 years or so. Making paintings at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston was a great time to develop surrounded by art history residing in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum across the street and The Museum Of Fine Arts a block away. Making painting in my West Oakland studio is where I began to hit my stride with my personal style and process appearing in 1992.
Being in bright LA with its steep mountains, trees, stars visible at night, and the rolling giant Pacific continues to bring me in for a swim past the breakers every week. I am open to anything but skeptical of fears. My swims have taught me this. Useful fear seems to usually need a trigger and not a preconceived notion. This brightness and freedom I feel in LA showed up in my work and this work was first exhibited at ACME. in Los Angeles when the gallery was on Wilshire Blvd.
I have been thinking about the word “believe” more since the arrival of COVID19 and election denial. Believe is a word that makes me pause and analyze where this belief originates from and what motivates it?
The ocean shows up in my paintings a lot. The ocean connects me to my natural state of well-being as does making art. I grew up on the Rhode Island-Massachusetts border near Fall River, Massachusetts, and Mount Hope Bay. Making art has always empowered me, having the world at my fingertips to steer my experiences and present alternative paths.
In the spring, I will be having a solo exhibit at BG Gallery, in Santa Monica and a two-person exhibition in Leipzig, Germany at Gallery ARTae with Berlin artist, Kata Unger.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
The bumps in my road living as an artist are a lot easier to get through than before I committed to my nature of being a working artist.
My journey as a toddler started with a lot of amazement. My first memories of creating a visual happening was when I dumped the bathroom trash into the toilet to watch it float and sink. This seems to be the beginning of my journey to becoming an artist but a few years later things got very difficult in the family as I was dealing with my parents divorce and mental illness in my family. My solace during these times came from creating in the sand that ran down the hill on the street I grew up on.
At the age of 12, a very difficult time had turned into a time for a lot of fun. On the floor with markers in the RISD Museum in Providence, I participated in a Children’s Workshop. Here, my dreams were awakened as I drew from old masterworks. Surrounded by people that appreciated and encouraged art makers was quite different that what I was normally around. After this experience, I took my art-making moments seriously until I was about to enter college.
I grew up in the shadows of textile mills’ smoke stacks, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Here is where I was taught to fear my dreams because they would perpetuate the legacy of poverty that my family experienced. I was encourage by my family to start with a “practical” plan B, study civil engineering. My failing health at the age of 20 and then some supportive experiences of seeing people appreciate my artwork again, finally lead me to let go of finishing my BS in Civil Engineering to pursue being a working artist.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
The Social and psychological content in my work is what people mostly talk about. My paintings begin from the unconscious; an active process that echos a self-hypnosis type of meditation that I learned when I was 12.
As they develop out of my automatic mark-making process, subjects present themselves in the images. With these thoughts in mind, my inner playground introduces you to characters bent on progressive pleasure. Illuminated by joy, an expanded sense of possibilities is triggered. These new historical paintings point to a better result after the battles and parties.
Political and social critique motivates me to flush out these images more as they come from a trance or self-hypnosis state that I learned in meditation classes.
I often depict people together in my paintings and have also brought people together through curating group exhibitions in Los Angeles. Last May, I curated an exhibit titled, Indecent Exposure – Exposed and Unconscious, at bG Gallery in Santa Monica, CA.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
Jacqueline Bootier, my life partner and artist: When I was living in fear of poverty and studying civil engineering, Jacquie saw what I had been painting that was stashed under my bed and wondered why I was not fully nourishing a path toward being an artist.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thomaswhittakerkidd.com/index.html
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thomaswhittakerkidd/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomas.w.kidd
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnKId1ggKJzxZfBcMaGFGNg
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aV2SQ5VqE4
