Inside Art Episode 1: Tom Franco
Published:
April 5, 2023
Passionate about creativity and community, California based artist Tom Franco makes whimsical found art sculpture, brightly colored fantastical paintings, and large scale story-telling ceramics.
For this first episode of Inside Art, I speak with artist Tom Franco who lives between Los Angeles and Oakland, California. Endlessly creative, passionate and community driven, Tom makes whimsical found art sculpture, brightly colored fantastical paintings, and large scale story-telling ceramics.
We talk about all the things we didn’t learn in art school, like creating community, collaboration, letting go of the outcome, finding affordable studio spaces, and how to be a happy person. Tom shares his journey and what lights him up – from working with found objects, to collaborations & art parties, interviewing an earlier generation of ceramic artists, and creating studio space for fellow artists.
Also listen on: Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
“There’s something about building energy in a physical space, creative energy. That makes all the difference for me as an artist.”
Video Highlight
15 min excerpt from Episode 1 with artist Tom Franco. “The connection of purpose, there’s purpose behind it.”
About Tom
Tom Franco studied at California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA and now makes sculpture using found materials, community inspired paintings and a variety of narrative ceramics. His work could be considered folk or outsider art, but in essence is inspired by his life in California and his love of storytelling.
Passionate about collaboration and building community, Tom co-founded the Fire House Art Collective in 2004, first as an art gallery in Oakland and later transformed it into a project to develop community art studio buildings, with 5 spaces spread throughout the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada.
Tom’s links
Website: tomfranco.com
Instagram: Tom__Franco
Community Art Spaces: Fire House Art Collective
Images mentioned
Cow Herder with his Speckled Horse
Orange Tiger in the Jungle w/ Colin Hurley The Painter of Cats
Exhibition at Space 10 and Unicorn Cat
Comets From The Sky, Volcanoes From Below
Artists mentioned
Alan Chin
Organizations
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Transcript: Inside Art Podcast, Episode 1 with Tom Franco
Sarah Rossiter Welcome Tom Franco, to the Inside Art Podcast. My first episode. I'm so honored to have you because your energy is the ultimate of what I want to create in this podcast. You are so creative and collaborative, and you have this enthusiastic playful spirit. And I’m really excited to share your art with everyone.
Tom Franco Thanks Sarah. Yeah, great to be here.
SR Tell us a little bit about where you are and what you're up to.
TF Well, right now, physically I'm in Reno, Nevada. I don't live here, but we started a project. We're sitting in the classroom space, which is downstairs in a three-room complex. So behind the classroom is a gallery about a thousand square foot gallery, and upstairs are art studio spaces, which is kind of the model that I turn to a lot as far as community building, which is creating space for visual artists to convene and make their art and have each other to support each other.
SR Yeah, I kind of got thinking about that when starting this podcast. When an artist starts to reflect on their life and what they want to create, so many thoughts about how to make it come in—struggling to find community, to have a space to work. Just the really basic stuff that people in other fields don't really think about. Like if you have a job, you have an office, right? But as an artist, you don't necessarily have a studio or other people to talk to.
TF You don't necessarily have anything. My experience—and I know this is not everybody's experience because some people have the opposite and they're like, "I don't know what you're talking about"—but most artists don't have anything. I talk to a lot of artists. I don't know if I meet an artist every day, but I look every day for artists because they're out there and I feel like it's my job. Yes. But for my role in life, I've just kind of accepted the status of saying, "If you're an artist, I have to talk to you." Like, "What's going on? What's your story and what's your version of this whole experience of trying to make it?" Make it is also a mindset of how you're trained to be an artist in the world, but also it's more just like, "How are you doing?"
SR Yeah. Are you feeling successful in your life? In your art?
TF Yeah. Can we support each other? Not only am I interested in the things you're making, but then also who are you around? We're kind of going deep into it right off the bat, but that's how it is. There's no time to waste when, if I meet an artist, it's like, "Tell me everything because I might never see you again." But on the other hand, we might connect in that moment and be like, "Oh my God, we're doing a project," and we're doing an art project together, we're doing studios, we're doing community work together. It can happen instantaneously because it's kind of this raw space to be operating out of, a vulnerable space. But maybe the word is entrepreneurial, because we just have to make it up and there's no right answer. There are definitely wrong answers.
There are a lot of pitfalls. There are "wrong" self tapes going on in people's heads, in my own head. There are challenging feelings that need to be sorted out. Like, "Hey, no problem. We'll just put you to the side." Because what are the obstacles to just the fact of making your art? How do you strip all that crap away so that you can make your art? That's kind of my life mission, you could say, I sometimes call it my thesis. I didn't go to the highest realms of college education. I did do art school in college, but as far as going as high as a thesis, my thesis was an entrepreneurial go at tackling the reality of being an artist.
SR And creating community. So you have an art gallery that you started many years ago in Oakland, California.
TF Yes, called the Firehouse Art Collective.
SR Now you're branching out, right? You're creating more spaces.
TF Absolutely. Yeah. It never ends. I did have a good time in college doing art. I did have to self-train or self-help. Self-help myself to find the direction I wanted to go in. Not just what I wanted to make, but also again, how do I do this? They didn't teach in my schools the idea of community-building and artists, like what do artists do together when they come together? What do I do during the day if I'm doing art at night? There is no talk about community. Definitely not as much as I needed and ended up experiencing outside of school. So pretty quickly it became, "We have to do this ourselves," and bring the artists together and the strategy was physical location. It's very exciting, my experience, but also at any moment it's very exciting for artists to get together, to talk, to share, to critique—people like to critique each other. That's not my favorite thing, but, just to be like, "Oh yeah, we're artists. Let's be in communication."
SR Birds of a feather, right?
TF Birds of a feather, yeah. Too often it's a little bit shy, it's a little bit awkward, or too cool you could say also. It doesn't mature. And I very quickly found that more than 50% of my time is spent doing the community-building versus making my own art. I kind of squeeze my art-making in wherever I can. I travel around with portable, art-making supplies and projects, which I can show you because I brought them here to Reno.
SR Yeah, great!
TF Just so it's like whenever there's a minute, or 30 minutes, or an hour, it's like "All right, let's just make some art here." Like my own traveling residency program. But this idea of building community, it was so fascinating. I've known you for a while and just being around other young people my age at the time. What are you, 21 when you leave college? People leave college at 21, 22, let's just say up to 24.
SR I guess so.
TF Let's just say up to 24—young artists. Does anybody have the training or experience of programming a group of people to stick together and run a business? Not a lot. So I found myself in these positions of like, "Oh yeah, I can gather people, I can attract people." But then we're sitting in a room and it's like, "Okay, what do we do?" Some people have been trained as artists or have some schooling or not, but not everybody, and then it's like, "Okay, well can you make your art on your own if you have a studio? Yeah, maybe." But we had to figure out how to have a physical space. It became about physical space.
SR A place to make and meet and show and converse.
TF There's something about building energy in a physical space, creative energy. That makes all the difference for me as an artist. If I don't have that, then I'm just kind of spinning out. I'm isolated. I can be upset about it. I don't want to say depressed, but you know, people can get depressed where it's like, "I'm missing something." There's something missing as far as building creative energy. That's also part of the strategy, how to cultivate creative energy so that I don't get to the point where I'm like, "Why am I an artist?" I don't want to ask the question, "why am I an artist?" Because that's too easy of a place to go in general society. You don't need to be an artist. You could be something else a lot easier. I don't want to ask that question because I know I'm an artist. I have to make things. And I know I'm not alone. So get rid of that question. Like, "Okay, we're artists." That's the first identifier. "Hi, I'm Tom. I'm an artist." Okay, great. Welcome to the club.
SR "Where do you live? What do you do?"
TF "Where do you live?" Yeah. "What do you make?" Let's stop wasting time.
SR Yeah. A lot of time spent trying to find your location and your studio practice. We're all so creative that it feels like a waste to look for that.
TF Time wasted just on step zero. Which is, "I'm an artist." A lot of people don't get past that.
SR Our society doesn't really have structures in place to support that, in my opinion. I've lived in New York, L.A., San Francisco, where there are major galleries in museums and institutions. Nonetheless, I don't feel that we're supported in a very large way or in specific ways. It's always a struggle. It seems like a struggle to create that space. So I'm really grateful that you've created this space. It looks like you've housed a lot of artists, at the firehouse and other locations.
TF We've been doing physical location projects for 18 years. I guess it's 19 years now. And we've probably tackled—there are five active ones now that are up and running. But over the years, I don't know, there are maybe even 12 projects that have happened.
SR Each space has studio space for multiple artists.
TF That's the main thing that I go for, like, "here's a building not necessarily built for art studios, actually never. How do we turn this into an art studio?" The general thing is it provides 24-hour access to artists. It's a month-to-month lease. We don't lock anybody in because things change. People's lives can shift on a dime. So what happens when people start coming into a space to make their work is the energy builds. It feels a certain way, it's very attractive, it's inspiring. When I go to a space like that, ideas just flow out. It's like, I don't get blocks, creative blocks, in that kind of environment. Then people make their work. So from there, what do you do with people making their work? Well, you have art shows or you have events, you invite the community in. You invite the next layer of community, which can be your neighbors, other artists. These next layers of activities start to form, which I don't think is my main mission. Like I do get involved in galleries, co-living spaces, retail spaces, we've done a number of cafes, we try to sell art, but those are like extra layers. So I would rather partner with people who have more specialties or are interested in those things rather than me trying to run them myself. Because I always come back to just art studios. That's where I want to be. That's where I want to spend my time. Again, it comes back to the opportunity to make my own art.
SR Yeah. But there's some really great energy and happy people around you. It's collaborative.
TF I don't want to get stuck in these business models where I can't get away from the computer or I am not interacting with other people. If I'm focused on the studio model, there are plenty of opportunities for me to have a studio in one of these places to actually make the work.
SR And your work is amazing. I love your work. I have not seen it in person for about 15 years. I think I saw when you were at CCA and you were doing ceramics, we did a little visit. But I love your paintings and I'm so excited for all the assemblage work you do and it's wonderful to follow you from your website and your Instagram. I'm excited. I know that your work has a lot to say, so it's important that you have that time in addition to this awesome community-building that you're doing. But I also want to touch on performative projects. You took a bus trip across the country. Like, what was that about? That was wild.
TF Yes. So again, these layers of what can happen when I start to drill into physical location, gather artists together, and what comes out of it. Somebody sent me a message yesterday about a new book that's out and it's a whole book of two scholarly artisans talking about the scientific evidence that making art, being creative, is a boost to your whole system. Like, in a health way, it's a mental and physical health practice to do creativity on a regular basis, which is pretty cool.
SR Yeah. We do creativity on a regular basis over here too. I think that's my life mission to help others do creativity. Let's do creativity together.
TF Totally, and it doesn't matter what it is.
SR You and I have a background—I'm going off the script here—but we have a background in meditation. That's how we met, through that practice. I feel like it really informs the way that I make art and the way that I understand other people now. A lot of that was, well, we were teaching too. So creating, holding space, but also being really flexible and creative and spontaneous, like responding to what people bring in and how can we work collaboratively. So, I think it's beautiful to see how that's working in your day job.
TF Totally. I love that. That goes right into the development that is like, "Okay, if we're working in our own neighborhoods and our own communities and building this kind of creative community, well, what are they doing next door in the next town over? Is anybody doing it over there?" It's like, "Let's go meet them." It can get so hard for people running businesses. They just have their nose down and it's like they have goals and no distractions. It's so important to pop your head up every once in a while, like, "How's it going over there?"
We got eight artists together on a bus. It was a school bus that was just retired from the school circuit in Idaho. One of the artists bought it and so we kind of decked it out inside, made it not an operational bus, but made it, had bunk beds in there and a little kitchen, and storage really for art supplies and stuff. We drove around at the end of 2021, I think. Yeah, that sounds right. We did 30 cities in two months, and we had pre-planned stops to different arts organizations, galleries, museums, art fairs, anywhere that somebody wanted to host us as artists. Everybody said yes, anybody we called up, we might've known them before or we might've just had an introduction, or we might've just not known them at all. We're like, "Hey, we're coming in a bus. Can we stop by for a day or two or three or four?" and everybody said yes because the bigger the institution was, the more planning and scheduling and bureaucracy they were dealing with.
It's like they could have a waiting list for three to five years for an artist to come and be active with them. We were saying, "We're coming tomorrow." And they said, "Oh, we don't have to do anything? Like, there's no pressure on us? Come on over. Our doors are open."
SR Park in our parking lot.
TF Sleep on the bus, in your parking lot. To have full access to some of these places. Some of the memorable ones were top-notch art facilities, dream locations. It just kind of blew my mind. I was like, "how many people actually get to see these spaces?" If you don't live in that city, maybe you never get to see it. You don't even hear about it. So we brought a camera crew with us. One of the guys was filming the whole time, and we had been doing film work in the past already. We would like to go and meet important artists who had something to say. Oftentimes, seniors were towards the end of their careers and lives and we would get them on film. So this was like a continuation of doing video work around the arts and we would go and film to highlight a location, what they were doing at that location. We would film ourselves making artwork with the community. If nobody was around, if it was like a dead opportunity, we'd just make art ourselves and film that. It could be in nature. We were doing a lot of plein air painting, like landscape painting.
We also had this joke where we had a clay sponsor, so we were doing plein air, clay-making, so like sculpting clay out in the wilds, landscape sculpting, which I hadn't heard anybody else do. So it was kind of a funny inside joke. Then we also were like, "Okay, if we have all this clay on the bus—which was silly because it could break on the bus—where can we fire this stuff?" And we were on a hunt across the country for kilns, kiln access, and were blown away by how many artists around the country are doing clay. I didn't know. It's everywhere. Everywhere.
SR Every community center you'll find a clay class or ceramics facility.
TF Big and small. So that was fascinating. But then also when we would come across like an important artist, somebody that we felt is a significant artist contributing to the visual art language for everybody. Can we interview them? Can we go to their studio? Can we see what they're doing? These are like hidden gems. Oftentimes, undocumented for whatever reason. Probably kind of the same stifling effect that we were talking about earlier where not enough appreciation for this library of artists here. Like there's so much knowledge, so much to share, but nobody's asking the questions. So that spun off into doing documentary projects to tell some of these stories. It can be about an individual artist. It can be about a whole art movement. There's a clay revolution that happened in the sixties that kind of started in the Bay Area, but it was all over the country, really. East Coast and West Coast where the only thing to do with clay is functional pottery, like only pots and bowls and functional things.
There was an explosion in the sixties where it turned into sculpture and that had never happened before in modern art. So, it was a breakthrough of traditions. It was not accepted. It was like, "Oh, this is bad. These artists are troublemakers," and they would get fired from their jobs and so forth. It's a real art movement that started in the United States that doesn't get talked about. Nobody talked about it in art history to us. I just kind of stumbled onto it when I was in the Bay and some of the teachers were directly involved in it, and I was like, "This is real? Like this happened? This is crazy." Another thing that happened in the sixties was during the same time the Beats poets were happening, I can think of meditation revolutions happening at that time.
SR Political, feminism, Black Power. So much unrest and upheaval and deconstructing the power and really questioning, "Are we supposed to be making cups and mugs or could we just make an object and destroy it?" And that's the work. Yeah. I had professors like that too. There's a huge movement through California. I think you've been privileged to meet a lot of these awesome artists from that time period, right?
TF Yes. The people who are still alive. Again, it's like clay. Clay has this special place for me because the clay art scene is so accessible. The top clay artists are not treated the same way that the top painters are.
SR So you can talk to them.
TF I couldn't call up the top painters and be like, "Hey, we're coming around in a bus. Would you be—" then there'd be a "Click! Sorry!" But with the ceramicists, not only do they tend to be nicer people, more earthy people, but they're also more accessible. A lot of them want to tell their stories. So that's been really fun for us to dive into that. We did the bus and the direction that fits into my overarching picture is this idea of traveling residencies, as an artist. So we have Firehouse Art Collective, which is focused on community spaces, but then we're kind of dabbling into this area of me as an artist. I'm doing all this because I like to make things and I get inspired by these trips and seeing studios, seeing artists.
So as an artist, I don't go around with the name Firehouse Art Collective. I go around as Tom Franco Art, and then the group of people that I'm working with, sometimes it's a direct collaboration. Like, "Hey, it's Tom." Let's say Alan Chin who I work with a lot, or we've been going by Tom Franco and the Ice Creams as of lately. So a group of collaborators is like, "Hey, we'll go, let's go." And we work together a lot and—
SR Wait, say that again. So what's the name?
TF Tom Franco and the Ice Creams.
SR It's like your band name. I love it.
TF Yeah, it’s a band name! So we'll get invited to do a public art mural project, let's say. The last one we did was in Miami at Art Basel last year, and we were part of a bigger project, and it's like, "Okay, who wants to go?" And so we go.
SR I saw that. It was great. So let's talk about your work, my friend. Do you want to show us anything you have with you? Or you want me to talk about paintings that I'm looking at on your website?
TF We can do both. Do you want to walk around?
SR Yeah, let's go.
TF Okay.
SR Look at that. That's beautiful.
TF This is a part of a series that happened on the bus actually, and it's guitars and these wooden masks. This one I collaborated with Colin Hurley on.
SR So you've got the guitar and then you attach mask-like structures made of wood, and then you paint them.
TF Yeah. It's all found objects, or collected things.
SR Yeah.
TF But this was a series. I don't work in series all the time. I kind of bounce around.
SR I love it.
TF I do have ongoing series, but I don't tend to work on them all at the same time. I'll just switch off because my creative brain doesn't like to just be like, "Okay, you gotta paint a hundred flowers," or I get bored.
SR Yes.
TF The inspiration goes away. So here's another kind of series that is playing off of the idea of cups. So ceramic cups.
SR So for people listening—I'm going to try and maybe you describe it—but it's like this cup that you've added a bottle on top of and then you've painted it.
TF So this series I start with, this is a mug, like a beer stein. Instead of just having a vessel, I fill the vessel with another bottle.
SR And another vessel, you stack it.
TF This is glued on pretty good. But then I take the imagery that was on the original cup that I didn't make, and I extend it up and I do my own imagery in the same style or thematically so it becomes a collaboration with the first artist into my vessel. This idea has grown over the last year. This one is a normal teapot with a normal cup. You know, these things you would find in the kitchen, and then they happen to fit. This is a perfect fit.
SR Oh, awesome.
TF So this one is going to be a UFO.
SR I thought you were going to blow on it and make music or something.
TF So, I'm going to create the driver of the UFO, so he'll fit in there, and then I'll put some clay, air-dry clay pieces in there, and then there's going to be some—
SR Wait, what was that little object? It was a crystal skull, like an amethyst. Where's that going?
TF That's gonna be inside.
SR Oh, cool. Yeah.
TF It's going to be the driver of this UFO. And then I have things like this, that are going to be decorating the outside of the UFO.
SR Yep.
TF I think of that as camouflage because whenever there's any kind of UFO lore or sightings, they're like, "What is that? What's happening?" And you don't really know. So that's what this is. It's like a disguise, like "Oh, it's a tiger ship." Well, no, it's not, it's this person.
SR That's who's really in there, is the amethyst alien. I love it. You're letting us inside your creative brain.
TF These are all things in process. So here's a group collaborative painting that I started. It's kind of a school yard scene. I do a lot of community scenes, just people hanging out and you know what do you do when you get together with the other people?
SR Yeah.
TF So that one's in the works. Here are some of my finished pieces.
SR Oh, great.
TF So this is a skateboard.
SR Oh, cool. Show it from the side. So there's like a relief of a man on a cow dog, maybe?
TF Yeah. It's a horse.
SR Awesome.
TF It's a cow-herder.
SR Got it.
TF It's 3D and 2D pieces.
SR Looks like it's in Mexico.
TF Yeah. It's a Mexican scene.
SR Or a cosmic scene.
TF Kite flying.
SR Super incredible. Okay. So how do you start a painting like that? Do you have an image in your head or do you just start painting and things come to you?
TF Yeah, both. Like this is a scene in Berkeley where I live. Yeah. There's a hill called Kite Hill. People fly kites there, and there's a kite festival there. So, I was just like, "Oh, I want to paint a picture of that." And then these little inserts are fun because they're kites. You can draw anything on a kite and it makes sense thematically, so it's not just so random. Here are some more simple thematic pieces that are painted on saws.
SR Wow. That's amazing. It's like a path with a guy walking and trees.
TF That's me and my dogs and my wife.
SR On the path, the winding path.
TF To the apple tree.
SR Do you feel like there are themes that have always resurfaced in your work? Or is it just like a free for all? Like, "What's Tom's brain gonna come up with today?"
TF I had a period where it was always about making something new and that was kind of early on. It was like, "Oh, yeah, I don't want to look at anybody else's stuff. I want to just make it new." Every piece was new. That lasted for a long time, at least 10 years. But then it got to a point where it's like, "Well, let me revisit some of those, because those were good ideas. There are some good ideas here. So let's do it again. Let's do the same piece. Let's do the exact same piece again, and it's going to come out differently." Just to explore that iteration. But what ended up playing out?
There seems to be two paths. So one path is the themes, the ideas that I want to portray over and over again, or build upon the stories. The other one is the materials. So every time I look at a saw now, I think, "Oh, that's a good canvas" like, I could paint something on that. If I look at a tea kettle, I'm thinking, "Oh, that's a good spaceship." I've used a lot of things that I find attractive. Like I don't tell myself, "Oh, I want to use this shape." I'm out in the world and then something looks cool, and I think "Oh, that's interesting. How did it get into that shape?
Or do I really use this shape every day, as a cup every day and not really look at it?" There are some objects, like physical objects, that have so much story to them and importance and power to them. Like this shape, for example, it's a cylinder, but it's also—without spilling the drink—it's a circle. This is as important as the wheel. When the wheel was first conceived, how big of a step was that? As far as functionality and technology goes, it's major, huge. Right? Or this is also the zero, right? But then the wheel extended into space creates the cylinder. Okay, well what do you do with the cylinder? I don't know. It's a cool shape. Okay, well it can have liquid in it. It can channel, it can travel liquid through it, which becomes very important in our modern society. It can be a vessel and you can drink out of it. This is like the first technology, like the most ancient technology is a clay cup. Like, that's incredible.
SR A conduit.
TF So, if you're playing with some of these ideas that I take for granted, it's like, just behind me in the room, there's a cylinder right there.
SR Yeah, the air ducts. I love air ducts.
TF We live with some of these things all the time and then with this air duct, for example, when this building gets destroyed, oh yeah, it's going into the trash. Where I pick it up, it's like, oh, yeah, there it is on the side of the street. Oh, that's kind of an interesting shape. What do I want to make with it? And then I play off of the nature of physical objects and see what stories they want to tell. Maybe they're telling a story of being in this building for 10 years and then being discarded. It's like, well, what happened in that building? Oh, we made art, we made community art. Oh, okay. Well, you should be a piece of art that has something to do with community.
You have that energy in the object. So I'm playing on that level all the time, of time and space and community and who used that object, who was associated with that object and telling that story. That's my sweet spot. It's kind of this play between materialism and storytelling. Then where it gets to be something a little bit more expanded is like, I'll actually just tell a story. When I tell a story it's a children's book story. The last art show I did in LA they challenged me on this where I had probably 40 pieces on the wall. And they said, "Hey, why don't you do one of your stories for this show?" and so I took the narratives out of the key pieces in the show, and I strung them together in a children's book story. So the characters that I had sculpted would go through and interact with each other and be in this world where they could exist. That's kind of another more extreme part of this process where it leads to.
SR Like a new narrative, a complete invention.
TF An invention from playing off of what I was already inventing. Right?
SR Yeah.
TF There are a lot of layers to this and a lot of circling back, but it builds. The interesting part of that for me is like the same way that I would build community with actual people. Like, "Hey, just come on over. Let's, let's hang out and talk about ideas or whatnot or maybe we make our art for an hour together or something." You start to build community that way.
Naturally, the sculptures I make are the same thing. "Oh, let's get these objects together and they can talk to each other a little bit and see what they want to tell together." There's a moment in the sculpture where it's like, "Oh, an epiphany! I know what it is. I didn't know what this was when I started, but now I know what it is. Let's tell that story." Same thing with the community. I didn't know what we were doing. We just got together and then there's an epiphany where it's like, "Oh my gosh, I know what this is. This is healing the city, healing a place for the city to come together and tell stories about people's lives or what they're going through." As things build, there's that "aha" moment where it's like I know the connection of purpose. There's purpose behind it.
When you started talking about meditation, it's like, same thing with meditation. You sit down, maybe this is all just meditation, because you sit down quietly and you're like, "Man, let me just clear my mind a little bit. Nothing major's going on," and then suddenly out of nowhere, it's like, "Oh my gosh!"
SR Whamo!
TF The secret of the universe just flashed before my eyes! And it's like, how rewarding is that? It's not like a far-off thing. It's right there with you, with me, just paying attention and adding it up, not missing any of the gems that present themselves, because there's always something cool that presents itself.
SR It's a participatory process where you're present. While you were talking, I had so many words come to mind. But it was like, this ultimate collaboration of listening to the objects or listening to what's going on and then interjecting and there's like this playfulness to it too, where you're like, "Oh, that means this." You're not just an observer. You're really interacting and you are helping to create a story. Yes. But it's like assemblage, collage. It's the essence of that kind of activity but it's happening on a verbal level, on a story level, on a physical level. I love how you're working. You're being very "Tom."
TF If you think about it as far as another kind of art form, let's say a theater group—
SR It feels theatrical. You feel theatrical.
TF Or like a martial arts group. Like I've been in some schools, some martial arts, tai chi school.
SR Let that energy flow.
TF Energy flow, building up your physical and mental health inside of movements. That doesn't get questioned. It's categorized. It's like, "Oh yeah, that's Tai Chi." You're going to a play which is on a stage production and the actor, the troop of actors, interact together and they've been practicing for months and that does not get questions. That's what it is. "Oh yeah. My brain understands that." But when you get into community building, and also I think visual arts are a little bit on the underdog status, just because it's so easy for a visual artist to isolate and not break out of that mentality and they're trained to be an isolated loner. That's damaging, and it's like, there are so many other models that can fit into the community art realm, that seemed untapped to me, that seems ultimately healthy, that seems like an answer to so many things.
SR There's a lot of energy and excitement in this, what you're talking about. Feels very healthy, and very nurturing to any kind of creativity.
TF All-inclusive. You know, is that even possible?
SR That's a big point there. That's a really unique point, actually. I don't think many people in the art world use that term.
TF No. They use exclusivity. A lot of the systems in the visual art realm are built on exclusivity, art stars, and celebrity status. If you're not that, then you're not an artist.
SR A kind of class-based exploitation of like, you make the art, we sell the art, the person who's wealthy buys the art. End of story.
TF Exactly.
SR But you're interested in a much more collaborative full spectrum kind of universe.
TF Inclusivity does not mean that those models don't exist. It's like inclusivity means everything exists. So you can have all of the above. That's totally possible. I want the public to be able to tap into these ideas and these lifestyles from a lot of different perspectives. Some people will be attracted to one thing over another. But it's like, hey, whatever gets you in the door, right? Whatever, turns on a creative process for the individual. That's very interesting. There will always be something fun and dynamic that would come out of that. I'm going to go back to physical spaces because for me, that's where it all starts. These physical spaces can happen anywhere at any time, as long as there are people, right. If people gather, this can happen.
SR Could be a bus, could be a building, could be a street corner, a parking lot. I want to go back to your paintings. Do you mind if we look at your website and talk about a few paintings together?
TF Yeah. Let's do it.
SR I want to talk about some of your work on your website. Maybe you just take us to your favorite thing. I was looking at this tiger painting, I think from 2020.
TF So this is a big painting. This is about a 6x6 canvas. Tom Franco and the Ice Creams were invited to the music festival in San Francisco in the park, which is Outside Lands. We were doing live painting. So we had three of these canvases going and there were thousands and thousands of people walking around enjoying the concert atmosphere. We decided to do big cats, which was the theme. So, this was the tiger.
SR Let's go to your Instagram.
TF This is—
SR The Llama Mama?
TF The Red Llama and boy. So I collected these toys. The Red llama is made out of wood. I did not make it myself. I collected it and it did not have a tail. The kind of alien bug thing is a baby toy, which was like, "Wow, this is so cool." This is what you give to babies. Taking things that really were lost and didn't have a home and not really seen anymore, but then spicing them up. I had this orange fur that I had used on old projects in college like years ago, and thought it would be a good time to bring it back out for the llama. I made the pants for the boy and painted him. The shoelaces on the boy are these beaded things that my wife had made for another sculpture that we collaborated on. I didn't want to throw them away, so I reused them. The tail is kind of a nod to these Mexican craft sculptures that I'm always so fond of where they just take wooden elements of the figure of whatever, the animal, and they just stick it in. It's just stuck in there. You have this little toy and you can take it out if you want. It's so charming. So I thought that would be a good way to put the tail in this. It's just a paintbrush with the little fur on the tip that's in and out.
SR Awesome. I love the humor and the playfulness of it, but it does feel quite solid and serious. There's quite a serious gaze happening with those red eyes.
TF Totally.
SR You're mischievous.
TF Totally. These guys made it into the picture book story that is the most recent one.
SR Oh, from your recent show?
TF Yeah.
SR Show us some pictures from the show. I really wanted to go to LA for that, but I wasn't ready to travel. So you just had a show at a gallery in LA this past summer in 2022.
TF Here's Space 10. Well, let's see if I have other pictures of it. Here's the gallery. It's an enclave of other artist studios, there are probably 10 artists in this one area that share a big parking lot and they turn one of them into a gallery.
SR Nice.
TF So Space 10 is coordinated by Alan Chin and Axel Wilhite, both artists themselves.
SR I see a lot of rocket ships there.
TF A lot of rocket ships. Yeah. Right, and the table here.
SR There's the one you showed us. Oh, another teapot.
TF There's a cat one.
SR Nice. So it feels really whimsical, but also kind of like artifacts, especially with the masks and the objects on the wall. Like we're looking at some other worldly discovery.
TF Totally. This was one of them on the wall, this guy.
SR And that's ceramic. You made that? Or is that some object that you've appropriated?
TF This disc is a plastic pack for pens.
SR Oh yes. Love it. What does it say?
TF It says "A band-aid of slipping book friction dedicated to breath for you."
SR Amazing. I mean, this stuff is really out there, Tom. I don't even know where to begin, but it's fascinating. Right?
TF So this is a unicorn cat.
SR Looks like a werewolf bear.
TF Totally, totally.
SR An angel fairy. With a medical skill.
TF Exactly. It's a medicine healer figure, which are not always presented in a very peaceful way. Some of these medicinal healers are scary looking, right? So in that realm. But the horn, which you can't tell so much, actually sticks out of the—
SR Three-dimensional.
TF Three-dimensional. It's a piece of a chair leg that I thought was carved really nicely. The face is three-dimensional. The cat is made from Mexico and it's half of a coconut that they make little masks out of. This was like a—I don't know what this was, it looked more like a wolf, but I turned it into a cat. Then I painted these smaller ones, like this small unicorn figure here. There's one behind the horn that you can't see in this photo.
SR Reminds me of improv. Have you ever done improv? You know, where you just dance or you act, but one person has one idea and then you come up with another idea, and all of a sudden it's this whole narrative. The way that you think and work is so improvisational.
TF Totally.
SR It's really fun. Obviously, there's something very succinct and unique about the way you think, because I could never come up with anything like this. But it's also whimsical because it's not attached to any sort of teachiness. You're not trying to get across a story or a message that's supposed to be something. You're just really exploratory.
TF Super exploratory.
SR Am I right?
TF Absolutely. So there are two tricks in the way I got to this point.
SR It's your process, right? I'm understanding you through your process in addition to the final image.
TF Yeah. So, the two distinct things that I would point out about a piece like this is, the first one is collaboration. So, I could have made this by myself and tried to think of these ideas by myself, but it would've been a lot stiffer and it would've taken me more time and it would've been very serious. But the collaborative process, meaning I work on a piece with another artist, and usually we just pass it back and forth. Sometimes we work on it together at the same time. Like somebody like Colin I can do that with because we understand what we're doing. Somebody can take my idea on a piece and completely change it, and then it's like, "Oh, well I'm not doing that anymore." Like, I have to adjust, I have to go with the improv.
SR Yeah.
TF So, that has trained me to do that on my own. From one day to the next, my ideas are going to change, my feelings are going to change, and the way I want to, the work is gonna change. The big part of that for me is I don't want to do something that is a task. I don't want to be bored. I don't want to be forced into making something—every moment that I'm making, I want to feel good, I want to feel excited. So, that means I have to work in a way that makes sense to me, like to my hands and to my brain. Then the other piece that I think really goes into a work like this is the found objects because the objects made this piece and those are the things I'm collaborating with. It's not a person, but it's an object that has history like we talked about. So, I kind of wound my way into this final presentation of this piece, but it had different iterations and you would've said, "Oh, it looks a lot like a completely different piece at different points."
SR Do you ever take pictures as you go, like, "Okay, I know this is never going to look like this. I might as well take a picture now"?
TF Oh, yeah. I want to show you more of a process.
SR By the way, while you look, I just wanna tell a little story of the ego. I feel like we have similar processes in terms of trying to find a practice where the ego dissolves and you're forced to make work without attachment to the outcome. Obviously, we both have a history of studying yoga's ancient texts, but it's along the lines of that, of non-attachment, immersion in flow and the energy, the shakti—what wants to come, how can I listen? How can I participate? I started my practice many years ago, like 30 years ago in New York, trying to collaborate with other people, thinking if a bunch of us made art together, there would be no author. So we wouldn't have an ego. It kind of failed.
But I think since then I've been looking for ways, tropes, activities, processes—that's how I want to engage. I look to the material to help me drop that desire for the I-ness, like "I did this." So you're doing it either with the person you're collaborating with, like breaking your process up by having somebody else take it and transform it, then you gotta start over, or you're also doing it with the object itself in the conversation. You're giving the object this like equal collaborative ability so that it's not this very dry, stodgy thought process of the artist. It's funny how we have to create these methodologies so that we can have fun and be more free-flowing.
TF Totally. Well, so I love what you're talking about. Usually what I find in collaboration, moments of collaboration, is that it's not that it becomes too complicated, it's that people don't push it far enough, and stop too early. Actually, most artists who I find are struggling, it's simply because they didn't go all the way to the very end.
SR Deep into the interesting subject they're wanting to do.
TF There are still unanswered questions.
SR Go in deeper. Yeah.
TF But it could be questions, it could be narrative-based, but it could just be the story of the piece itself. What I find is that these remind me of kindergarten exercises. And it's like, somebody can do a little doodle and it's like, "Great. That was awesome." Seriously, like, "Good job doing it. But then do you color the doodle in? And then did you put that doodle next to another doodle? And then did you write the story of that doodle, the backstory of that doodle?" It's like there are so many layers that if anybody were to say, "Just color it in, just color in your thing. Fill it with color." It's like that takes it to the next step and then it feels like, "Oh, that's a finished piece." Solves a lot of problems just by going to the end. I often work on things about this size, if given just my own natural habitat.
SR Of your hands.
TF I can hold it in my hands, and it's way easier to tackle than a six-foot canvas. I can work out a lot of ideas on that size. So, it's kind of like keeping me in training. So then when a bigger project comes up, like a mural, like let's go back.
SR You're warmed up.
TF Let's go back to the top of here. This mural, which is, I think it's 14 feet tall, whatever, 24 feet wide.
SR Can you zoom in on that?
TF We already have ideas for making smaller things that were put directly into this canvas.
SR They come back. Are those like pipes of some kind of factory object, or are they more like organic pipes?
TF These are references to ceramic pipes that we work on.
SR Yeah. That's what you were talking about before. I love the sky in that one. That's very wild. Oh, and there's a sculpture in the middle.
TF This sculpture is made out of metal lawn chairs and references the pipes also, and then we have these—
SR Oh, beautiful.
TF Coconut cans.
SR They're like candelabras. Coconut candelabras.
TF Yeah. But the public was invited to paint on this during the presentation.
SR They were? They collaborated with you. Awesome.
TF So anybody could come and paint on the sculpture, but those pipes are referencing these pipes.
SR Oh yeah. You made these pipes. So did you make these or did somebody help you make—that's a large object. A large ceramic vessel.
TF Yeah. It's a single extruded piece of clay that's a pipe. They make sewer pipes that go into city infrastructure for developments in Phoenix, Arizona. It's called Mission Clay. They invite artists every once in a while to come into the studio and you can carve on them and you can glaze them, and then they put them into their huge kiln and you have like an instant public sculpture. These ones got installed at the Oxbow Public Market in Napa—that's the market, that's the team. So John Toki is on the right here, he's like everything ceramics. He's just a huge innovator around ceramics. So he's developed some of these programs and he's one of our old teachers, but also we continue to work with him and he's like a big mentor for a lot of us.
SR Awesome. I love that you do ceramics and painting and sculpture and it sounds like maybe you even might do some film.
TF Definitely doing film.
SR Community, human-building.
TF Totally. Well, my wife is a producer, so she pulls me into the films, and then I pull her into the art projects. The visual art projects.
SR Is that your object? The sculpture. That's beautiful.
TF This is a three-way collaboration. Part of the bus tour. We stopped at a place in Denver called La Serra Collective, and they're all about ceramics, but they do some special wood firing with the community supporting it. Once a year, it's like they call it an Onaga kiln. So, it's a Japanese design, you put the wood in by hand for a week in the front of the kiln and it fires off a 30 to 40 foot long kiln that's underground.
SR Amazing. When it was all finished, what happened with the object? It stayed there?
TF Right now, it's there. This group is kind of strategizing to do some more larger-scale ceramics and then figure out a show or what to do with them. Yeah. It's hard to make large ceramics, like you do need a community, I find, to finish something that big. I would never do it by myself. But here's something smaller scale.
SR So this is from your CCA days or CCAC as they called it.
TF Well, we went back. They closed the campus.
SR Just closed down, right?
TF Yeah. So we went back and we asked if we could do a little residency with the students who were attending at the time and just hang out in the studio and give some good energy, but also film. This was an example of "let's bring a camera in here."
SR Before the space dies.
TF These are the last things made at CCA Oakland. This one's a nod to Viola Frey, who was one of the professors there who did some amazing ceramic works in her time. These are her sculptures, and this is her, for size reference.
SR Yeah. So there are a lot of important artists that need to get more attention. I would love to look at Viola's work. I will link to that too. When I was in LA, I met Magdalena Suarez Frimkiss. Have you heard of her? And Michael Frimkess…
TF We're going to meet her next week!
SR Tell her I said "Hi." She gave me some work. I love her.
TF What do you mean she gave you some work?!
SR Oh, I shouldn't say that out loud. But she gave me some ceramics for my daughters. She's a very talented artist. Somebody who was unrecognized for so long, you know, and kind of reminded me... I thought of her earlier in our conversation when you were talking about artists being older or being a bit isolated and she just lived in her house and LA and made her work for so many years and people started to discover her recently. But yeah… I feel like there are a lot of important stories and a lot of quiet moments to be discovered in the work. Your mugs remind me of her in some ways. Look at that. Yeah. Nice.
TF These are big, like you need two hands to pick that up.
SR Oh yeah.
TF I don't know if I have a size reference.
SR That's the size of a wheel. That's huge. It's really funny actually. It's kind of comedic. Like, "How much coffee do you want today?"
TF So Magdalena is in several shows right now in LA. So we were filming some of the shows and then the curators were like, "You better go see her right now because she's getting older." Also, her work's getting a lot—like you were saying—a lot of attention.
SR I mean, well deserved too. I feel like it's hilarious. Her work is really funny and she's a brilliant person.
Those columns are really cool. I love this transformation of scale from a small mug to a gigantic 10-foot column. Also, the minute cat to this huge thing. That's cool. I want to see that one close-up. That's cool. This is you carving away on the clay column. Incredible. What was that like? Was that so fun?
TF It was completely transformative.
SR I love working at a large scale.
TF We went to Arizona several times. In this photo, it's during the summer, so you can see the sweat here, it's like working in a sauna.
SR Oh, I see.
TF We had to drench the floors so that the clay wouldn't crack too quickly. And then in the winter it's freezing. So it was very physical. I think a lot of the residency stuff we do is very physical. Like who would want to put themselves through this kind of stuff?
SR Only an artist.
TF Well, for me part of it is like, "Something interesting is going to come out of that." Let's put ourselves in uncomfortable situations to make some interesting art. And it always comes out—one of the elements to work with is the setting.
SR Yeah. The discomfort, or the not knowing, that ability to take that leap of faith to just go for it. I don't know what's coming, but I'm going to make the work anyway.
TF That's right. Yeah.
SR Show up. Show up and find out.
TF Which makes it hard to work with other organizations because if they have any kind of planning that they need to do, it's like, "Oh, let's just see what happens."
SR We need a description and a bio and a waiver, legal release, or something.You're like, "We're just going to make some stuff and see what happens."
TF Yeah, exactly.
SR This is the dichotomy of why it's hard to be an artist in this society because it's not always categorizable. You can't say what it is before you do it. It's just a state of mind.
TF At the same time, nobody explained this to me either. So much was like, if you're gonna pitch ideas to a project or an organization, it's like they do need to know. So it's like, "Okay, you better come up with your idea." Right now, you're on the spot. What do you want to make? Okay, and then, I like to do a lot of drawings for that kind of thing. It's like, "Just draw it out, whatever I draw is what we're going to use as a reference." So, that's been a skill that took me time to chew on a little bit, like get used to doing.
Looking at this pipe is another good example. An artist could do a design and say, "This is what I want to make, now I'm gonna hire a team to go do it," and as an artist, never even stepped foot in the studio. That's another way to go. That's not what we do because at the same time, there is some energetic transference into the material. Like if you're spending time with it, and especially extreme time, whatever extreme parameters we're working in, it's like the energy can be pretty high. We can put in 15, 18, 20 hour days on occasion because it's like, get it done and what else do you want to do? Like this is, we're never gonna come back here. Like, get it done and that also goes into the work. You can look at work and feel like, "Wow, there's a certain something, I'm feeling something—I could even close my eyes, but I'm still feeling something about this work." Material does hold the energy of the artist.
SR Well said. I agree completely. Although I don't agree on the amount of time, I know that time is relevant, but I find that I make work in extremely short periods of time and sometimes I make digital work and it still holds the energy, the intention. But I still really believe in that concept. It's very interesting to me to think about how the energy of an artist is transferred to the product, the outcome. That's the profound kind of benefit of the work, but it's kind of a byproduct too.
TF Yes.
SR You're doing it because you're—what compels you to do it, if you had to say?
TF First, it would be—selfish isn't the right word—but a self-sustaining need. I feel better, more grounded, and more ready to engage with the world when I'm doing my art. I'm not congested. I'm flowing more, which is a huge plus for me. If we ripple out into the things we've talked about, like the community part of it is like, okay, well then, like having that core crew of people, you could say friends, but it could be friendly without even knowing the people. So there's something about engaging with other people. It's kind of like figuring out what it means to be a human on this earth.
What are the tools that everybody should be practicing just to feel like a whole human being? It doesn't have to be through art, you can do it through whatever your passion is, but I think passion is a big part of being a whole person. To miss out on some of these things—passion, creativity, community, physicality, working with your body, mind, spirit—these are important core understandings about being a human. Where are you going to get that class? Like, who's gonna teach that class? Maybe, it's not a long enough class. Maybe that's a lifelong class that you have to keep engaging in. For me, I kind of lean into what's available to me, what am I naturally drawn towards to get those effects and art is one of them.
I would be silly not to use art to my advantage, to not share that with other people. Somebody else might use something else, but use what you have. We could go to this one. This is a pretty involved piece, which was a microwave with a street cone volcano on the top and a lampshade in the middle, which was a collaboration of quite a few artists. Actually, about four artists on this one. We made this live for a video crew and did a short piece. It's about 10, 15 minutes. I'll send it to you, but it explored my art process, but also the Firehouse Art Collective community building process.
SR I see that kind of graphically in there. But that's an interesting subject to just quickly touch on. So I try to make work now with my kids around and sometimes it drives me up the wall. I'm like, "Will you please give me three feet of space?" Because I'm just trying to intuitively, peacefully, birth something. I'm a loner. As a child I played by myself. I actually collected a lot of these similar objects as a kid from the garbage and just filled my room with strange things that I found thrown out from the cosmetic store downstairs. I was always making something, but I did it alone. So you are actually collaborating with several people, in public, with a film crew and making, and you're okay with that. Tell me about this quality you have, this foreign thing I don't understand, but I really admire it. I think it's the nature of your "community-ness." And also it's so experimental that you're totally not attached. You're like "Well, what's going to happen?"
TF Yes and that's a practice. So, that's definitely one mode of making work, which is more performative. These art sessions, these little art parties, which can happen at my house or at one of the studios and just people either making their own work or making stuff together. It's just like, "This is an art party, so loosen up." Whatever, I think is like, "Oh, I have to express this about my ideas and my feelings." It's like, "Loosen up," and I can do that tomorrow. If there's something I have to do, I can do it tomorrow. Like right now we're doing a party. What happens at an art party is people tend to go to their strengths and they will do art moves that they feel confident about and they've done before. Not always, but just the natural thing to do is like, "This is my best art move. I'm going to do it for the party, like in front of everybody."
SR I love it.
TF You learn from each other because it's like, "I always wondered how you did that, or "I never thought about that. So, I have to do something that's my best move because you just did something pretty cool." The learning is amplified and it goes really quickly. And it's supposed to be fun, it's joking around. One of the funnest things, and I think it really lends well to the film part of this, is the conversations that happen when people are joking around in the spirit of creativity and hands messy with materials, it's like so funny and so charming and whimsical. Doesn't have to be that, but that's where I like to go. To share that with the broader public is what I want to watch.
SR I feel like we have to have a Zoom art party. I don't know if it's possible.
TF Sure it's possible.
SR We can try. Can't really mess somebody else's workup though with the remote option. But ultimately this looks like your work. It looks like you.
TF I guided this piece.
SR It has your energy.
TF I finished this piece, so there were big collaborative moments, but then it was like, "Well, who's gonna finish it? Like, people have things to do." It's like, "Well, I'm going to finish it."
SR You adopted it.
TF I had come up with the major themes also, which I think is fun to do. I will follow somebody else's project. We've done that before too. It goes to wherever their intention was, whatever show or setting they wanted to do. It's like, "Yeah, great. Let's do it." I always learn something from it, but I will definitely continue to do my own because a huge part of my process is this kind of work. I can take this, what happened with this piece, and break it down and do other versions of it in solo work or other group work. It's kind of unending. To your point too, it's like I can't do my illustrative work in an art party. It's way too focused and I'm trying to be way too exact with it. That's a private setting. There are different moments for different types of art.
SR It's a wide terrain that you occupy, that you're traversing. It's really exciting. Thank you for bringing us into your fantastical world.
TF Absolutely. So good to see you.
