ANGEL OR DEVIL

Lucky G Lawler and Kandace Blanchard hung out with Thomas D Wright on and off for a week while in London and found him to be such a dichotomy that Lucky decided to follow him for a while, and his work has developed so much over the last year that it has been well worth the effort and the wait.

About a year ago, a sharp-looking dapper suit with a very skinny tie and the biggest red laces walked into the club. I had to find out who it was.

The next day I found a flyer stuffed in my pocket. It was an image of a surgeon’s hand in the midst of his life’s work, a depiction of a hand that could give life back to the poor soul beneath it. It struck me as if it were the hand of God. I was hooked.

Walking through Whitechapel and into Gallery 46 for his show A Corporeal God, the low Georgian East End building, last used as a nursing facility by the London Hospital (synchronicity?), immediately confronts you with Thomas D Wright’s extraordinary photographs and large paintings of surgical operations.

“I was privileged enough to witness and capture images from a heart bypass surgery.”

He had been invited into the operating room by Dr Giampaolo Martinelli, consultant cardiothoracic anaesthesiologist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

“To understand how we work and what lies beneath the skin is highly intriguing. It also makes me meditate on the fact that once we peel off the wrapper, by and large, we’re all pretty much the same. It’s only a series of electrical impulses bouncing around our brains in different ways that separate us.

This is heart surgery, but it’s presented in such a way that it becomes more cinematic and artistic than documentary. I’m trying to give more of a qualitative response than a quantitative one, representing a sense of awe and emotion that I’m experiencing.”

Thomas D Wright has a contemporary Baroque vision to his work.

“There are many links between the surgical imagery and Baroque paintings. I find these elements of hope and faith fascinating. Who will be your saviour when you’re on that table?”

The reflections that Wright offers us are without words or clear intentions. If he can invoke these feelings, who are we to argue?

“It’s when a painting stops you in your tracks and makes you consider only that piece. It’s these moments that take you out of your current bubble and make you feel alive.”

In his early years Wright led a multimedia lifestyle.

As a DJ creating electro sounds, he was playing at clubs, festivals and raves.

“What grips me about making music is that I’m able to raise and lower excitement, change moods and create atmosphere through sound, total escapism.”

He was also a successful tattoo artist in the Manchester underground arts scene, surrounded by the addictions that often come with it.

“After many years in the scene I made the decision to sort out my scattered life. I went on a one-year working visa to Australia. When I returned I moved to London, which is an epicentre for artists. I studied, and through university I got the support I needed to leave a hedonistic lifestyle in the past and reinvent myself.”

It was a life decision to give it all up and go to art college.

He gained a First Class Honours BA in Illustration and Visual Media from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, before moving on to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2023.

It gave him the time and experience to become fearless with paint, colour and composition, something he brings to this new incarnation of himself, painting with passion.

“Peter,” an early work, shows a decapitated horse’s head pierced with arrows, being carried with care in a man’s arms.

Death, work, love and life. Wright chose his authentic meaning over the worldly opportunities he had earned, and that choice has consequences.

“I’ve ‘bankrupted’ myself several times to get onto the path of where I want to be.”

He uses “bankrupted” as a metaphor for the opportunities he had earned and been honoured for but walked away from in order to stay aligned with his passion, desire and joy, the same drive that inspires him to start work at 5am each day.

What are you willing to do?

“You’ve got those few hours before the world starts to wake up and people start bothering you with pointless nonsense. I can’t wait to get out of bed and get to the studio in the morning. There are few places I’d rather be.”

In the last year, the direction that Thomas D Wright has pursued following his extraordinary surgical series began with a painting of a cardinal and surgeon titled “Confession”.

“Yes, cardinal-esque, and the clergyman is the one on his knees.”

Perhaps his quest around life, death and belief is being questioned through the lens of religious experience.

“Art is my divine guidance.”

This continues in a series of figures that could be clergy in red hats, morphed forms that might even be self-portraits. Even when using other models, the series feels like a release of inner conflict and demons. One wonders where in his soul he finds such inspiration.

There is also an early series of anatomical studies, portraits that explore the face we show the world versus the dislocation of our inner thoughts. They look beneath the façade, revealing distraction, fragmentation and abstraction of thought.

“If you start to paint without thinking about it, what’s going on in the back of your head starts to come through. You’re channelling something through your hands, perhaps a kind of mask of truth. It’s about allowing the subconscious to flow. It’s more the abstraction of what’s going on behind the face.”

His painting process is deliberate. Between the colours and the determination with which he strikes the canvas, there is a fearless and powerful form of mark-making, building up and tearing down an image until he realises it could be better.

“If it’s going in a certain direction I’ll just allow it to continue. Often I’ll get to a point where I don’t like it, which can be two or three days in, which is a bit of a problem, but then I might like one section of it. So I’ll scrape everything off and maybe just leave that one section. Once you scrape the paint away it leaves remnants of the previous layer, scratchy marks and interesting textures. I really enjoy what appears when you remove the paint. They very rarely start or finish the way the first layers suggest.”

His portraits are a homage to the great Baroque painters and themes of angel versus devil. As the world swings from one political extreme to another, Wright seems to be tuning into a kind of generational collective unconscious.

“Sometimes there’s an image in your mind that won’t give you a moment’s peace. What else was I to do but paint it?”

TDW is going strong.

To watch him working on Instagram, his short reels on his new works as they develop: @tdw_artist
and check out: www.thomasdwright.com

Extraordinary published photographic books of his experience in the operating room:
LUNGS OFF Volume I and LUNGS OFF Volume II.

Thomas D Wright also had the honour of presenting his surgical photography at the Royal Society of Medicine for the London School of Cardiothoracic Surgery (@lsoc.uk) annual dinner. The slideshow presented that evening silenced the room.

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[Header Image| Thomas D Wright | Lungs Up]