Yolanda O’Bannon interviewed painter Tom Beil at his Berkeley home on April 28, 2009.

I’ve known Tom Beil since 8th grade in Marshall, Texas – back when I was taller than him – a fact I remark with pride since he is now 6’ 3” and I stuck at 5’ 5.” Us transplants to Marshall, a small East Texas town in the piney woods near swampy Caddo Lake, bonded with a few local misfits into a scruffy little band of our own. Tom’s parents’ rambling Victorian historical home in the middle of town was our base for nighttime wanders out in the woods to scale the Hallsville water tower, and Summer Solstice parties with readings of Edward Gorey’s Beastly Baby and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. After college in Austin, Tom and I both migrated West to Berkeley – me for grad school and Tom to be an architect. He had always been a good drawer – I remember a cool full-page cartoon dragon in my high school yearbook – but somewhere around college he started oil painting. And right away, a person understood that this wasn’t just your oldest friend Tom Beil dabbling in paint, but that Tom’s art was for real – a weird, wonderful and completely unique world where the commonplace and the extraordinary collide, celebrating the deep, gorgeous sanctity of the ordinary, and the homely comforts at the heart of the fearsome unknown.

YO: How does an oil painting start? My favorite painting of yours is the one with the Buddha in the boat…how did that start?

TB: Oh, yeah – the Texas Flood – that one I saw a picture of in National Geographic. Usually it’s pictures I take myself but that one was a picture in National Geographic and it wasn’t actually floods in Texas – it was up the Mississippi somewhere, Missouri, somewhere like that. It was just these old boys in a John boat in deep water that didn’t used to be. I admired the photo – it had a certain symmetry to it, and kind of a desolation to it…there were these buildings submerged. Anyway, for years I’ve been laying over this lens of a bubble – fisheye – perspective. So I distorted the picture and then found the Buddha statue and put that in, too. And threw a fish in there because I didn’t know when to stop and then Voila! It’s a painting! The appropriate level of absurdity has been reached…let’s proceed! [laughing]

YO: Do you remember about how the Johnson’s Oyster Farm Mandala picture came about?

TB: Yeah, we used to go out to Pt. Reyes, to Johnson’s Oyster Farm, a lot. It gets exposed to a lot of weather – salt water. There were some old kind of decaying things and I’ve always been attracted to decay, in a Romantic way, and so I took pictures of the truck. Johnson’s Farm itself is on this little estuary that’s kind of picturesque – so I took some pictures, and distorted the perspective, but it wasn’t quite complete as a composition.

I think that was the first time I put a real Tibetan character, just real literally, in a painting. And then I thought, well, if you’re going to go that far…part of the Tibetan visualization practice is to meditate on a mandala. This is my interpretation of it – where the mandala is a representation of a three-dimensional reality and as a part of the visualization process, you imagine yourself being that deity and walking through this mandala that has been manifested in three dimensions, encountering different people and interacting with them, as part of your faith.

So, I thought, okay, that’s a cool image, so what if Johnson’s Oyster Farm is inside a mandala and there’s Yamantaka and a gateway. You know, those mandalas always have gateways and you walk through a portal. And, again, that was, okay, it’s about the level of absurdity it can reach, and then it gets painted. [laughing] Oh, and then throw some fish in there! Okay, we’re done!

YO: Was there a time or a piece that was either the culmination of a growing time for you or represented a breakthrough, a change from where you’d been?

TB: Well, the painting that Miller has [Texas trial lawyer and friend, Mike Miller] – the Muttony on the Bounty – was the first painting I did. I had never painted before so I read a book about oil painting – just to get some of the technique down. Then I did that and thought, well this isn’t so hard, it’s just kind of tedious, but it’s not too bad and you can make things big – you can make your own poster art!

YO: …Cheap!

TB: Yeah, just vast amounts of time invested. So, that would have been one. And then I don’t think I did one for a while and then I did the Branch Davidian one, and a lot of people just liked that and I thought, I can do this…so I started painting more.