YO: Do you still make furniture?

TB: Well, not so much, but I made the gates [gesturing to the deck], and the little shrines, and made Maelen’s [Tom’s five-year-old daughter] little shrine down there in the back garden, and made her a little easel. I like to work in three dimensions.

I’ve got an idea now to hang something from that tree – make this kind of abstract wind-driven prayer wheel, so I’ve been gathering the pieces to do that and making little experiments with it. It would be kind of strung on one single line. So far, it’s made out of an old bike fender, and a bike fork and some front wheels. The idea would be that I would have something that would catch the air because the wind comes up the creek – to spin it. Then I found this weird thing to sit underneath it. It’s going to take a while.

YO: I remember Jim Goering asking you once about how some people in your paintings get haloes and some get the fire head thing… what is the opposite of the halo?

TB: They’re all haloes to my mind, but some have the fire in ‘em. Speaking of influences, I became interested in Tibetan art and the baroque nature of it, it appealed to me. It’s just so out there. And that started coming into the paintings. For me, these things started to express one of my beliefs that the divine is manifest in everything – in people. So that was a way of carrying it into the paintings. Sometimes the semi-sentient entity has a halo, but sometimes a cake has a halo…and it’s just an expression of “all is glorious.”

YO: And Jim had a fiery one, and was concerned that that meant “bad” in some way…

TB: No, that’s not what it means – there are people with that fiery energy, and there are people with more halo energy, and sometimes they switch. It’s not a good or bad thing, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes the haloes are transparent

YO: So, let’s think about that halo theme for a minute – what are the themes you often have? East Texas, Tibetan beings, haloes, fire heads…

TB: Yeah, I like vehicles – cars and trucks – old ones…

YO: And you like diner scenes…

TB: I like restaurants and that’s a little bit of Hopper’s inspiration, but not real consciously. I like the detail you get in those kinds of situations. I like the reflections – as a technical thing, I like to paint the reflections. It’s a chore, but it’s a little test. I like chrome and to paint the lights, and to pull off the reality bits of it, or the photo-realistic bits of it. Those little pieces are what often times bring it over the edge into a photo reality. When you get all the reflections and that sort of thing. But it’s also back to spatial, architectural themes.

YO: And there’s often earth, air, water…

TB: I often like them to have a little bit of a religious theme – a spiritual theme. I also admire a bunch of Renaissance painters and the only game back then was working for the Pope, for the church. And I like to bring that in.

YO: You often have nonsensical, weird elements, like the Costco Buddha…

TB: Yeah, that’s one where there was a more labored inspiration – something about the Costco and buying stuff in these huge baskets and that contrast between, you know, materialism and spiritual materialism. I was doing a lot of yoga then, with Rodney [Yee] and nobody like to talk about it but it was a real competition, and so I was thinking a lot at the time about who I was, collecting all these spiritual bits. So some of the paintings have an obvious, not too deep meaning.

YO: So, to finish up, what’s the best compliment you ever got about your art – the thing that made you feel the best?

TB: You know, this is interesting – the best compliment is that people -- my friends -- want them and want to pay for them. [laughing] My neighbor, [filmmaker] Les Blank, was saying, and now I get it, what he said. He said, “Yeah, I go to these film festivals and people applaud, they see my movies, but when I know I’m doing it is when they’re buying the movie. Applause is easy, but when they’re paying for it, then I know I’m reaching them.” So that’s kind of mercenary, but yeah, you know, when someone’s gonna sacrifice a bit of their livelihood to have your art, which is totally unnecessary, in terms of living, then it’s, “okay, thank you.”

YO: Thank you, Herr Beil.

Slideshow of Tom's Art