Thomas Dillon

Thomas Dillon is a painter whose loosely figurative work explores the act of painting without conscious intention, reaching towards deeper meanings by breaking with traditional notions of authorship. Though faces and bodies can be seen in his paintings, his work is firmly planted within the abstract tradition of automatism. Born in Staten Island, New York in 1986, he taught himself to paint following earlier creative pursuits in music and writing. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia.

Dillon employs a unique painting process that begins with a ritual meditation involving incense, mantras, breathwork, and automatic movement before he enters the studio. The artist actively seeks to eradicate any sense of authorship from his work, positioning an intuitive creative impulse, rather than a conscious sense of intention, as the creative engine of his practice. For Dillon, this kind of passivity, which he describes as “denying the self”, leads to a primordial kind of painterly communication. He describes a two-way relationship between him and the image unfolding on the canvas; a creative push-and-pull where the tools of its creation — including his hands, squeegees, syringes, toothpicks and chopsticks — work in unison.

In this respect, Dillon joins a long and global lineage of artists interested in creating art without conscious thought, often grouped under the term ‘automatism’. From Kazuo Shiraga, who engaged his whole body in physically intensive painting processes, to Karel Appel, who famously encouraged painters to disengage their refined critical faculties and “start again like a child,” this movement encompasses some of the most important painters of the last century. For Dillon, automatism is a path towards a true and distilled expression of humanity. It is a way to reach beneath his everyday ways of thinking and acting, towards a more instinctive and universal mode of understanding concepts such as image and movement.

Many of Dillon’s paintings centre around pairs of eyes that emerge from chaotic storms of abstraction, revealing loosely-rendered characters around them. These are not human subjects, nor are they animals; they are the impossible-to-categorise products of the artist’s automatic painting process. He is interested in how the inclusion of eyes lend a kind of legibility to an image, bringing his abstractions a sense of relatability and the possibility of a two-way dialogue between painting and viewer.

Dillon’s work has been shown around the world at venues including Ross + Kramer, SHRINE and White Columns in New York and La Bibi in Palma.