Thomas L Perry Jr.
I was born at home in 1981, a home which doubled as a steel rule die shop and a sign shop. This meant a creative childhood filled with machinery, wood and metal scraps, vinyl lettering stickers, drafting tools, a variety of different mediums at my disposal, and music– lots of music.
I’ve been a professional Steel Rule Die maker since 1997, self-employed since 2007, serving primarily the printing industry but also leather, textile, packaging, aerospace, and general manufacturing industries as well.
Steel rule die making checks most of my boxes for a creative outlet but not all of them. Die making is exact and rigid, always commissioned, always with a deadline. Painting allows for its direct opposite. I build dies by day and paint by night. A yin and yang of creative intent and the bridges that connect them.
My late father once told me, as I was learning to build dies amidst the struggles of being a new young father myself, “You can’t let outside problems prevent you from what needs to be done, just put your head down and do the work. If you don’t have work to do, go out and get some.”
EDUCATION
I’ve actively thought of myself as an artist from a very young age, I’ve never really wanted to be anything else.
As a child, I participated in a now defunct, week long, community summer program called Art Shop all 8 eligible years and performed at the annual Art Festival which followed it. I’ve attended this art festival every year of my life which has had a deep influence on my connection to the arts.
I took private lessons for a year at 13 from a local professional artist as most of my school elective hours at this time were filled with band and orchestra classes.
At the Highschool level, I excelled in every art class available. When I ran out of art classes, I dropped out at 16 to get my GED in order to continue my art education at our community college.
At 17, in 1998, I completed a handful of beginning college level classes but the birth of my first child and the many complications involved with that forced me to put it on hold.
In 2009-10 I took two more semesters at our community college and it was in an oil painting class that I finally discovered a love for painting. Prior to this, my technique and style development came primarily through the portrait as a subject using oil pastels, charcoal, graphite, or ink as mediums.
Moving to oil paint felt like a heavy weight of limitations and struggle had been lifted and I could finally fully express myself.
My entire life has been a process of self-learning through the act of creation, reading, watching documentaries and learning to see. And so, for the first time in my life, I finally feel like I have something worth saying, something positive and meaningful, something that feels like the start to a solution for a seemingly, unsolvable problem.
tommyfineart.com 