Hi everyone, my name is Tom Myer. As this is my first blog post on this site, I figured I should do the polite thing and introduce myself.
Here’s a photo of me and one of my pups, Voltaire. She’s super cute but also the dog that gets me up before 6am ready to take on the day.
My wife (Hope) and I moved to Boulder CO in 2019 after 22 years in Texas. Before that, we lived in San Antonio (we are both UTSA alumni) and had a short stint in upstate New York (Binghamton) where I attended grad school. The winters in CO are way nicer than upstate NY, by the way — here the snow melts after a few days, typically, whereas in upstate, it basically started snowing Halloween and didn’t let up until May.
Before coming to the states, I lived in Panama. Born and raised there, actually. My dad was a US citizen who worked for the US Government down there, so I grew up mostly in the former Canal Zone, attending American schools. At home we spoke mostly Spanish, and mostly English at school. Although, truth be told, we mixed all together into Spanglish.
As a kid I was fairly active as an artist, making all kinds of doodles and drawings that centered around my passions: science fiction and Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, when I got back into art, I did a lot of sketching, mostly of fun little creatures.
Most of that kind of art came to a screeching halt when my parents converted to Christianity, so I found that my only outlet was photography. I did a lot of that in high school and college (in fact, some freelance gigs helped keep me out of total poverty then) and that translated into an on-again, off-again hobby during my 20s and 30s.
As most things go, you end up focusing on school, career, settling down, and all the rest, and the things that you love kinda fall away.
In my case, as I took that turn into my 50s, I decided that I was going to take up art again. A quick series of experiments took me through oil painting (nope), acrylics (yep!), pastels (yep!), oil pastels (nope!), markers/pastel pens (yup), ink (YUP) and pencils (YUPYUP) and eventually, working with Procreate both on the iPhone (very limiting but still incredibly fruitful) and now the iPad Pro with 2nd Generation Pencil (incredible).
I’m very happy that I took the route I did, because although I think the majority of my work will be in the digital realm, having first hand knowledge of how to make marks with so many different analog tools has increased my ability to work quickly in digital formats.
So what is my current focus, arts-wise?
- I’ve been doing a lot of abstracts lately – they’re really my first love. I love working with geometric shapes, intense and vibrant colors, and tons of layers. Working in Procreate has really opened up my practice as I can experiment, work quickly, and create the effects I want to see with lighting and other tools that make digital work so exciting.
- I also love landscapes — most of my work here has been in acrylics and pastels, but I’ve been creating plenty of work in digital formats. I especially love taking a semi-abstract point of view there too. There’s so much to paint and gain inspiration from living on Colorado’s Front Range!
- I’ve been working on a lot of critters lately – both real (owls, wolves, bears) and imagined (dragons). Not only do I get a lot of inspiration from living in the American West, I also draw from both my teenage years playing Dungeons & Dragons, my graduate work in medieval literature, and my lifelong fascination with Native American folklore (I have indigenous blood from both my mother and father).
