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.

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I spent four years in school unlearning everything I knew about art as a teenager, and it was incredibly important for the way I view the world now and for my ability to discuss and create art in an articulate manner, but last year the time came for me to relearn what I'd forgotten. I've returned back to what first got me into making art, and that's drawing with charcoal. The physicality of making a mark on paper is a universal action that most people are familiar with to the point of it being banal (less and less as technology advances, I suppose). But mark making is simultaneously unique for each person. Marks on the page can be an easy way to identify the mark marker - my father's handwriting will always let me know it's him who wrote it. My marks will always be mine.

I make my drawings in order to feel physically closer to my friends. I tenderly smudge their figure with my palm. I sculpt their features with my thumb.

But this distance I've felt has left an abstraction which is represented figuratively in the work.

As for the poem: it's about New Orleans. It's about ownership of something that can never be owned, regardless of who created it and how. And it's me questioning what it means to steal culture, or if that's even possible.

Neither the drawing nor the poem have titles (yet).

"See" ya next week!

This garden
Tough and poor
Like you
Rock smitten silt drifting
With the woes of the Mississippi
Untamed animal
Unbridled passion

And from the chaos of the summer soil
Roses flare up to scratch the sun
Jasmine screams in the night

They are your kin
Or you are theirs
And together you will ride
This beautiful ship
And all will suffer you

But beauty is always noticed
(Sometimes for the Better sometimes
for the Worse)
And money floods
Your garden, threatening to kill
All that stand in its path

you say

There is no garden without me
My garden is poor and so am I
Nothing green will grow
Where my fingers have not proved their worth
Where my struggle has not sown its seed

But you are wrong
And the garden will prosper without you
And you will die
And roses and jasmine will bloom from your bones
And nature will run its course
Without you