Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Tom O'Brien went on to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, where he graduated in 2012 with a major in Interdisciplinary Sculpture and a minor in Printmaking. After graduation, he briefly taught large scale drawing at the Putney School Summer Program before moving south to New Orleans, where he currently resides. He plays drums in the all gay punk band Rim Job, but most of the time can be found making work out of his house in the St. Roch neighborhood.

My work is a reflection of the fleeting intimacies of gay culture in modern society. Simultaneously passionate and cold, my images confront the viewer from private moments. At times they lay out details for you to explore, while in other areas they purposefully give minimal information. Bodies are concrete yet ephemeral. Furniture fades into the room. It is this contradiction that I find beautiful, and hope to share with the viewer.

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Life in the dawn of the age of Covid-19 has been strange. I recently moved myself into my friends' empty apartment in the Marigny as they have left to go ride this out in San Francisco. I've been mostly out of work, but still pulling some part time gigs as a way to make some money working for other artist friends as they are still producing and selling work. I'm usually an incredibly social person, living with roommates and out with friends every night of the week to some capacity, whether it be drinks at a bar, dinners at home, or backyard movie nights. This pandemic that has led to intense social distancing has so far helped me feel somewhat refreshed and simultaneously aching for connection with my friends. I'm single, and this has been the most alone time I've had in years. I know it's healthy to some extent, but it's uncomfortable.

In my recent drawings, which I'll be sending to you this month, I've been exploring the feeling of intimacy. The work I've made over the past year has explored this concept too, in a much more sexually charged way. These new drawings are portraits of multiple friends combined into one image, not sexual at all. More to come about them as I develop them more and send them your way.

With this initial introduction, instead of sending you a drawing, I'd like to start with a poem.

In the midst of all the chaos, some more chaos was thrown my way last week. One of my best friends from college, who recently visited me here in New Orleans, decided to prematurely end her life. As a result, she was left on life support for several days, before her family made the incredibly brave decision to take her off life support (there was no chance she would ever come back), and donate her heart and lungs. In the days she was no longer with us, but still connected to this world via life support, I thought a lot about what that means, and what the implications are. I never found an answer. But as this nation struggles to keep up with the supply of life support machines, i.e. ventilators and the like, I'm still left with a lot of questions about the beauty of what we're capable of creating, and about our ability to play god with life and death. So here's the poem I wrote when she was undergoing the procedure to remove her heart and lungs and inevitably finish the decision she made to end her life.

In the pale white light of the morning
Machines hum
And whisper secrets to each other
Far too simple for us
To understand
Far too cryptic
Mystic gods of our own creation

I wish I could ask you-
Did your heart beat for
Something else
Were the rats
Too big in the harbor
Was love too far away?

But the answer is not binary
There are no zeros or ones
We are not machines
And love has never left