Working in oils, the works of Thomas Bils are a reflection on his adolescent quest to find meaning in the absurdities of his isolated suburban hometown of Melbourne, a small Atlantic town in Central Florida. Through the exploration of atmosphere, narrative and visual semiotics, he creates images to replicate complicated emotional suspense congruent to his experiences growing up — transient between anticipation and melancholy. Having assumed his role as the “Unreliable Narrator”, each of his works are developed in varied heights of truth and are left for interpretation on where they are placed in the actuality of his history. “Sticking to the traditional ideas of painting, I focus on creating images with an atmospheric weight that represents the emotions I felt as a young person navigating the process of growing up,” he says. “Within these images, I write and codify a Floridian lore based off of my experiences, building on the popular notion that Florida is a particularly strange place.”; ThomasBils.com.
