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.
YO: When did you first feel like an artist?
TB: Well, I have tried not to think of myself as an artist – particularly the older I got, because it sounds kind of pretentious. I admired some artists who called themselves whatever medium they worked in. Like, “I’m a painter,” or “I’m a sculptor” more than “I’m an artist.” I always did like to draw, and other people thought of me as an artist when I was 9 or 10. I guess I really thought I was an artist when I started painting with paints – that was like, okay, you’re doing what the big boys did. [laughing]
YO: About your process – I know that you often take a photograph and kind of collage it…
TB:Yeah, usually I work from a photo – and various degrees of collaging stuff – you know collided on the poor painting. For computer illustrations, I work on the computer. I do a sketch out of ink by hand , and then scan it and the Illustrator program traces it and then I basically fill it in. It is basically paint-by-numbers. You just apply colors to the white areas – they are different blending techniques – it gets kind of sophisticated – but it is still picking a place and putting a color in there, so it’s very similar to raw painting with a brush, without any real technique [laughing]. That’s what I like about the computer stuff – it’s pretty easy and it goes a lot quicker than…oil painting, which is tedious and time consuming.
YO: When you’re painting is it something that you really want to or need to do, or is it just fun, or maybe relaxing?
TB: No, it’s a chore. I have to go: “Now I’m gonna paint. I’m gonna get out the brushes. I’m gonna do it.” You know? And the reason is because in my life now the time I get to paint is between 8:30 and 9 at night. So it’s like, “Most of America is doing what they should be doing – watching Heroes or Lost or whatever – you know, they’re doing it, and here I am, getting out some paints….”
A group of painters I like are the Pre-Raphaelite painters – British Arts and Crafts and they were all so tortured and painted in this realistic way and they would say, our goal is to go out and for one day to paint something the size of a quarter. You know, spend all day on it, just try to capture the reality, and so I thought that was absurd. But now that’s usually my goal, is to “Okay, paint something at least the size of a quarter.” [laughing] Can’t go to bed until it’s done.
Once I’ve started, once I’m mixing paint, it’s fine, but then just getting up and doing it and turning on the light… That’s why I like the computer – it’s so much more convenient. When you’re done: Off! Don’t like it? Control Z!
YO: Why do you do it then, if it’s hard work?
TB: Cause I like the end product. There’s a power in, when it’s done, in going “There it is.” And its oil paint and it’s tedious but boy I can do it, so boy I better do it.
YO: So do you think it’s a need or more of a wish…to paint?
TB: I don’t know if I need to, but I like to – I wish to do it. I can be happy just working in the garden, but well I take that back. I will be working in the garden, and I’ll just get inspirations, like, oh, I gotta make that, I gotta paint that, I gotta do that. So I do get inspired, and I have to follow that through, to see if it’s a good idea. So I do get that impulse.
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.
