Tom Pazderka: An Interview, Part 1

Tom in his studio.

I’m not much of a self-promoter, the practice itself produces inside me an inordinate amount of anxiety, to be honest. To be ok with self-promotion, an introvert like me, has to put distance between himself and the subject to blunt the edges of the psychic impact that inevitably follows a sales pitch. To do this one has a choice, a flirtatious irony or self-conscious sincerity. I will do something very off-brand and attempt to combine the two, just to see how it goes. To do this, I will answer questions from a book that I quite like, as if I was in it.

Inside the Painter’s Studio is a 2009 book of interviews with artists who were, at the time, if not famous, then at least successful. Painters like Dana Schutz, Julie Mehretu, Philip Pearlstein, Ross Bleckner or Eric Fischl among others. As the title suggests, the book is an invitation into the artists’ studios, which is a bit like what happens during the Second Saturday Ojai Studio Artists Tour.

The interview style of the book is kind of perfect. The interviewer asks the same fundamental questions of every single artist, as if they were a category, only slightly differently each time. It’s a good way to get into the head space of the artist. And that is the entire point of what follows.

When did you consider yourself a professional artist? 

I sold my first paintings out of a coffee shop about a year after I graduated high school, but I did not consider myself a professional artist until many years later, and even then, for many years I went around calling myself a semi-professional. For a long time, I thought that to be considered a true professional artist, one has to be able to do their work full-time and nothing else. Today I consider that to be quite a false assumption. There are so many nuances in that terminology. I consider myself a working professional artist, meaning that I work in a profession, a career, to sustain my studio practice. I’ve also had periods when I was doing studio work full-time. My thinking is that it’s good to have a day job to pay the bills. 

How long have you been in this studio?

5 years

Did you have a plan for this studio, or did it develop organically?

I made a sort of master plan when I moved in. It’s a larger two car garage and there were these metal shelves lining the walls. The landlord said that she didn’t want me to paint on her new walls, but when I asked if I could use the shelves to build false walls, she was fine with that. I spent the next three to six months building out the studio walls in this U shape that created a smaller gallery-like space within the larger one. I attached slats to the shelves and clad those with drywall, creating a liminal space for storage between the main walls and the workspace area. That’s where I keep finished paintings, tools and all kinds of household things. There is even a small laundry room behind one of the walls. I definitely feel like I’m ready for a bigger space, but this has been one of the best studios I’ve worked in and the fact that I was able to plan it out, made a huge difference in how the space functions.

Has the location of your studio influenced your work in any way?

Every studio I’ve been in has in some way influenced my work, including this one. My work has become more refined and detailed, but also larger, because I have more space now. I started to experiment more with the process, adding more layers of ash, burning the paintings again once they’re painted and then painting them again, just to see how the paint reacts. I’ve also recently started to add color back into the paintings, which is something I haven’t done in many years. But also, because of how dusty the floor is sometimes, I started thinking that I’d like to work dust into my paintings as a material in some way. The paintings I make now are made from ash and oil, which recalls notions of nostalgia, memory, loss and grief, among other things. I think dust is also one of those ur-materials, an almost elemental symbolic presence in the West. I started working with ash, because it had a semiotic relationship with the subject of pyroclastic ash clouds and family photos, which were the two main series I was working with just after graduate school. It’s been a great material to explore and research. Dust seems like a natural successor to that. We’re all dust in the wind after all.

Do you listen to music or radio or have a tv on?

I almost always listen to something while working. I think right now I’m 80% podcasts and 20% music. 

Stay tuned for Part 2.