BIOGRAPHY
Born in Liverpool, England in 1966. Moved to Edinburgh, Scotland in 1973 and attended Edinburgh College of Art from 1983-1987. Over the years an “often outlandish, always wayward” career has evolved to include numerous exhibitions, publications, record sleeves, book jackets and recordings... His paintings sit in private collections the world over.
DT: “I recall trying to be an illustrator when I left art school... I had thoughts of doing children's books and the like... I used buy a train ticket to London and drag a portfolio of work around endless publishing houses in the pissing rain... Y'know trying to meet with so-and-so art-director... hoping to get my work into magazines, design agencies, that kind of stuff... Quite horrible and truly depressing memories... By and large everyone hated the artwork... It was resolutely un-commercial, impenetrably dark, tortured and insular... it showed no sense of any marketability whatsoever. Depending heavily on maudlin introspection, it was art-as-catharsis... And I REALLY liked that about my work... I thought that was its strength ... Unintentionally I had entered a side street, and then I stumbled along the painfully rocky and excruciatingly long road of 'art as personal vision'... if indeed it is any kind of road at all...
Putting aside all thoughts of markets and commerce, I simply paint pictures that come to me... I see my art as being staunchly traditional, typically protestant and surprisingly / unnervingly moral... I welcome basic, innocent elements; good intentions, naivety of vision, inevitable pollution of ideas from exposure to far too much mass media, limits of personal process etc... These are essential parts of any interesting struggle... I'm interested in the romantic notion of authenticity and feeling... I enjoy my capacity to love and hate in equal measure, and I'm forever inspired by those vast cosmological things that render all human endeavour tiny in comparison...”
Now a much-collected artist, Deryk Thomas's paintings are finally getting the 'official' treatment thanks to various online endeavours.
Deryk Thomas continues to draw and paint to commission. He also works with mentally disordered offenders as a state-registered forensic Art Psychotherapist.
Deryk currently lives in Buckinghamshire, England and since 2001 has been a half of the outré-electronic outfit Human Greed, with Scottish writer Michael Begg.