Chaos and Comedy: Tom O'Hern's Illustrations Aren't Trying to Be Charming

Hobart-based artist Tom O’Hern has a large output of paintings, photos, drawings, animations, outdoor stencil work, and graffiti. He’s also released a graphic novel, and is known to travel armed with a pack of homemade stickers to make his mark on publicly defaceable property. He centres all these different formats of art around one main theme: himself. “I like being honest about how unstable I am,” he tells The Creators Project , “I can say anything I want because it’s me. If anyone gets offended I can just go, ‘Well, it’s me.’”

This approach has seen his work appear in solo and group exhibitions in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart, and on the front of publications. He’s done residences in Hobart, Paris, and even Shan Xi, a traditional part of rural China, where he was given the title of Ghost Master by the locals. To this day he’s still a little unsure what this means, but assumes it’s a compliment.

In Tom’s work there is oodles of imagination, but really it’s just sculpted reality. “I don’t know if you really can make something straight out of your imagination. If you try to imagine a new colour, you can’t—everything’s based on what you already know,“ he explains. He often lifts ideas from classical portraiture or renaissance art, but equally from personal experience, and sometimes even The Simpsons.

Tom’s roots are in graffiti and stencil art. Starting as a hoodlum in his teenage years, he has exposed himself many times since then on canvas, wall, and screen. Over the last few years, he’s turned his energy to animation, which was initially inspired by a three-week stint in a hospital bed after crashing a boat into the Tasman Bridge (the main span across Hobart’s harbour). He was stuck in a room with two other patients; one had tuberculosis, another had taken too much acid and fried his brain. In the middle was Tom, a ball of sexual frustration stuck with two strange men. This was the longest time he had spent without masturbating since he was a teenager, and during this hospital tedium he often thought that you should be able to ask a nurse to lock you in a conjugal cupboard for ten minutes. This frustration gave him ample time to work on this little gem:

It’s worth scanning his website to see all the animated GIFs he’s created. “Animation’s something I want to mess around with more,” he tells us, adding, “but I never have that block of time that it needs, because it does take up so much time.” Perhaps he’s due for another boating accident.

There’s always a bit of anxiety when sharing work, especially if you put yourself in confronting poses. Feedback from family is something that Tom tends to think about, especially now that he has a young daughter, which has caused him to rethink about what art he wants to put into the world. But ultimately it’s honesty that pushes Tom to keep exposing himself. “[The people I know] are not necessarily my intended audience all the time. I know other people will look at it if you’re being honest about yourself,” he says. “If you’re being that degrading about yourself, I think strangers respond to that.”

Check out some more of Tom's work below:

You can visit Tom O'Hern's website here.

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