Thomas Anfield
“There is so much going on in this painting I find myself injecting a kitchen sink full of references into it- everything from Francisco Goya’s sense of humor, to the last conversation I had with my neighbor where she told me Covid forced her to think about who she might want in her own metaphorical lifeboat.”
— Sandra Botnen, curator
“It’s love, I guess. I am just painting moments that I relate to, and hope others can relate to, as love.”
Day 30 features artist is Thomas Anfield, and a finale to this journey interviewing 30 artists in 30 days (it actually took me 43 days). Conversations have been nourishing and I am left believing artist are the best people in the world. I have interviewed a wide range in terms of both style and stage of career, and for me, Anfield represents the best of the best. In a career where survival is success, Anfield speaks humbly of the honor he feels in simply being an artist. On one hand he takes away the magic, describing how he shows up to paint the same way anyone shows up for any other job. Then he adds, “While I’m doing my job, my art is out there doing its job too. People hang my artwork in their homes, and it may stay there forever. Children grow up, perhaps looking at one of my paintings everyday of their lives,” he muses. The magic of art returns when we consider the implications of how any one of his paintings might be affecting the people who live with them - the kinds of thoughts, feelings and imagination they have inspired.
Anfield’s art practice revolves around figure painting. He even became a dancer to deepen his understand the human form. Adding performance artist to his resume, Anfield founded the company Butoh-a-gogo, based on the Japanese dance form, Butoh (a dance performed in white body paint where the body is viewed as a slow-moving landscape). Practicing and performing Butoh caused Anfield to make his own observation, in which he came to understand himself, in the role of dancer, as a kind of puppet to the dance. From there he began painting sock puppets.
And his sock puppet paintings resonate with audiences. “I could paint and sell two sock puppets hugging all day long if I wanted,” he says. Anfield is the lucky artist that has to worry about the popularity of his subject matter, turning his art practice into an exercise in mere production. But Anfield is established enough as an artist to know how to balance production with fresh creativity and innovation.
“I am becoming more interested in group dynamics and portraying of power structures,” he says. I smile inside when I learn that Anfield actually stages all the sock puppet vignettes before he paints them, “I paint true to life,” he says. His compositions can be complex and I can only imagine how significant the mere stage of his scenes is to his process. His images capture much more than sock-puppet whimsy. My favorite is Ship of Fools depicting several monkey, skeleton and animal characters confined to a cardboard lifeboat. A puppet in a linen nightdress hangs off a make-shift mast. She doubling as a guardian angel and wind catching sail to the fools below. There is so much going on in this painting I find myself injecting a kitchen sink full of references into it- everything from Francisco Goya’s sense of humor, to the last conversation I had with my neighbor where she told me Covid forced her to think about who she might want in her own metaphorical lifeboat.
Anfield also likes paints he and his wife. He married another artist and their marriage has become the subject of several painting. I have to ask, “what kind of things in your daily home life make you to want to paint?” It is an awkwardly worded question, but still, I am surprised by his struggle to answer it. He rambles on for a couple sentences then lands on the most perfectly honest answer. “It’s love, I guess. I am just painting moments that I relate to, and hope others can relate to, as love.”
Thomas Anfield paintings are most often shown at the Petley Jones Gallery in Vancouver where he has been represented for most of his career.