“You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.”— Henri Matisse

With doodles-like-marks instantly familiar to any former high school student who has ever daydreamed in class as they relished in their Salad Days, Thomas Bils described his works included in the show as a “revisitation to the type of mark making reminiscent of my earlier years before I understood art could even be a vocation. Working with air brush and oil pastel, two mediums I was unfamiliar with at the time, I allowed myself to get lost in the repetition of the forms of a long practiced muscle memory.”

Thomas paints autobiographically in ongoing investigation of the mutability within truth and narrative. He crafts images often drawn from personal experiences, carefully blurring the borders between truth and fiction. It is in these slippages of recollection he incurs his role as the unreliable narrator to develop a narratorial ambiguity, and in this the viewer is engaged to consider where the fabrications occur in an attempt to grasp meaning and order.

Acrylic and pastel on canvas

44” x 34”

Acrylic and pastel on canvas

44” x 34”