Tom Besson was born in 1951 in Houston, Texas. He grew up in Galveston, San Antonio, Houston, Beaumont, and Wallis, a product of Nineteen-Fifties America, redneck Texas, a Czech immigrant subculture, and Roman Catholicism.
Tom Besson has painted since childhood; he attended University of Houston Art College for 3 years before “dropping-out” and moving to the counter-culture Austin of 1974. A member of alternative artists’ communities in pre-gentrification Clarksville, “F’Art’Sake” in the O’Joy Tirebiter’s Commune, Vanishing Point Art School, Alternate Current Gallery, and Elgin, Texas. A color-saturated palette, personal symbolism, and fluid imagery characterize his work.
In the mid-90’s Besson rediscovered his Czech roots. He retraced his immigrant ancestors’ journey back to Moravia where he now has a summer studio in the mountains. Czech imagery and themes appear in his large-scale paintings and small painted sketches. His current work has been displayed in exhibitions sponsored by the Czech Ministry of Culture and in contemporary art galleries in Texas and the Czech Republic.
Tom Besson has work in the permanent collection of the University of Houston and in private collections in Ireland, Wales, Czech Republic, Canada and the United States.
Born late in the life of my parents. Late in the life of my mother, at least in terms of the 1950’s and even late in the term of her pregnancy. I had no desire to leave, having found a warm secure place, who would? But finally, finding my burden too great, she did bear me, the last and smallest of their three. Ever craving attention then—same as today, I was one who stuttered and I still remember my mother, on her knees, listening, telling my siblings to be quite. Control issues? But of what are we granted control?
Did I say small? Then—same as today and all the time between. Small, thin, but please don’t say frail because we are all more than our bodies and I hope you throw spirit into the balance, affording me a fighting chance. So why would I choose to be like most around me. To set myself up for failure in arenas where others are better equipped? No, much to the concern of my father I found sewing and baking far more intriguing than any ball could be. In making things, there is a certain element of control.
And then the trip to Mexico. The dysentery that followed. No chance my tack would change after that. I moved from thinness to emaciation. My physical meagerness became part of my self- identity.
And the fever. Ah, the fever that scrambled time and made me know things are not necessarily what you think they are.
To read, to draw, to sew, to bake. All good things. Good things done alone.
And the glory days of the centennial. The centennial of the great war of secession. Lost then, but not so greatly lost as it is today, I found my heroes. Long bearded generals of a lost cause yet to be besmirched upon the altar of political correctness.
And thus started my pursuit of the arts. In my frustrated attempts to draw those bearded heroes. How often I praised those beards, saving me from the disappointment of failed mouths and any attempts at chins or necks.
What I thought insufficient, my teacher thought showed promise. At her suggestion my parents enrolled me in art lessons at the age of eleven. Dear Helen Coffee, what has become of you? Lost to me after spending those seven formative years under your tutelage.
An unfinished education at the University of Houston Art College, a few accolades and away into the failed revolution of the sixties. Even then I didn’t join in the party till a year after they buried the last hippie in San Francisco. I might as well have been a beatnik.
But experiment we should. Timely or nay. This I know because fever taught me—things are not always what they seem, or at worse can be imagined to be something else. So the commune and some time on the road and the wife, so loved that the children came, brining a tarnish to my idealism as the cultural revolution took a back seat to the more proletariat ideals of food, shelter and care of loved ones.
This led to a career in advertising. Taking a low rung of the ladder of prestige I became a sign painter. One of the finest compromises of my life. A brush in my hand and a profession in which eccentrics are expected. Dear Mrs. Coffee did tell my parents so long ago not to fear, I could always be a sign painter.
Never completely giving up the pursuit of my art, it took a back seat to the American Dream—owning a home, raising a family, tempered by the darker side of the, oh so failed cultural revolution.
And another page turned, another goal realized, I turned back to the childhood dream —to paint. The hurrying years had brought me to the mid-1980’s. In need of a rebirth (that a spiritual rebirth could give us again our wasted youth) I put a pencil back into my hand and sought out a creative community. I found that in the salon of Melissa Barrington, wild-eyed muse to many. Together and with others, we started Vanishing Point Art School in east Austin. Our goal—affordable art training in a counter culture atmosphere. Our accomplishments—lasting friendships of like-minded people, a few students, an open life-drawing studio that raised the models’ pay scale and an alternative gallery space. Yet another ode to creation sung together.
And the paintings came as they still do, watercolors reintroduced me to the joy of glowing transparency, oils approached in a manner new to me that mimics that glow and, finally, a second take with acrylics. And as life became fuller I became more full of inspiration.
The life of the city was exchanged for that of life in the country. A quieter, more reflective stage was entered. The small town of Elgin asked me to start an annual art exhibition. An opportunity to showcase my work and that of my friends, taken, has grown into a juried show with seventy pieces a year. It has moved from any available derelict building to be housed in a permanent gallery in downtown Elgin and is in its twelfth year.
As the years accrued so did the blessings. Mixed as ever with sorrow. After the death of my father I brought my mother to visit her motherland of Moravia. To hear the ancestral song of a land before unknown to me opened a new chapter in my life. A chapter still unfinished. The welcoming people call me back and I pack my studio and return again and again on painting sabbaticals. To live as a painter in the woods of the Beskedy Mountains, comfortable, alone, in a cottage at the base of Radhost, I have found the time and the place in which I can live my childhood dream of play with hairy sticks and colored mud.
