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These Chaotic Illustrations Aren't Trying to Be Charming (But Still Are)

Tom O'Hern exposes himself through his art.
Sheela Na Gig (2015) by Tom O'Hern exhibited in the show Dregs, Bogans and Third Generation Morons at Bett Gallery last year. All images courtesy of the artist

Known to travel armed with a pack of homemade stickers to make his mark on defaceable public property, Tasmanian artist Tom O’Hern has a large output of paintings, photos, drawings, animations, outdoor stencil work, and graffiti. He centers 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.’”

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This approach has seen his work appear in solo and group exhibitions around Australia in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart, and on the front of publications. He’s done residences in Paris and 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 O’Hern's work there is sculpted reality. “I don’t know if you really can make something straight out of your imagination. If you try to imagine a new color, 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 The Simpsons.

A GIF from Tom's blog

O’Hern's roots are in graffiti and stencil art. 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 in Hobart. 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 O’Hern, 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 10 minutes. This frustration gave him ample time to work on this little gem:

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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, “but I never have that block of time that it needs, because it does take up so much time.”

There’s always a bit of anxiety when sharing work, especially if you put yourself in confronting poses. Feedback from family is something that O’Hern 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 O’Hern 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 O’Hern work below:

An illustration by O’Hern depicting his daughter's birth (of which he says "it was a bit intense") for The Lifted Brow:

Dead cat GIF

Brightly Coloured Sphincters (2014) exhibited in the show Flat Earth at Black Art Projects

The Triumph of Deth (2012)

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

This article originally appeared on The Creators Project Australia. 

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