Victorians Farting: Interview with Deal artist Tom Maryniak
Deal artist Tom Maryniak on carving pub crawls into lino, stories and Victorians farting
Standing in the Blue Pelican restaurant in Deal, a three-panelled artwork of the picturesque seafront stretches the width of the dining room. Fusing a take on famous Japanese piece The Great Wave and Deal beach, it is eye-catching to visitors as well as representative of the chef’s Far Eastern-influenced menu.
Local artist Tom Maryniak, who grew up in the town, even worked in the building, which was previously known as The Black Douglas.
Currently working from his studio in Lisbon – where he is both enjoying the warmer weather and hosting breathwork meditation retreats for artists to reconnect with their creative cores – Tom has a number of pieces in businesses around the town.
“I’ve always been very connected to the arts in Deal,” he says. “There’s been a lot of musicians and artists here, it has been a very creative town for a very long time. The Black Douglas was an amazing bohemian cafe that was run by Dalziel, who was the great-great-niece of Bosie Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s partner. It was a very sort of chaotic but amazing space with lots of partying. And I met Alex and Chris, who owned The Blue Pelican through that.
“For them, I think when they opened the Pelican they wanted to have a piece of artwork that was connected to the building as it was, or connected to the town as it was.”
The piece is something of a departure from Tom’s usual style, which is centred on lino prints using uniquely carved blocks. A quick glance at some of Tom’s work and you can see elements of gothic illustration and tarot artwork - like a scene from a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.
“I’ve always loved reading and I’ve always loved theatre and storytelling,” says Tom. “A lot of what I do is sort of pictorial, poem-based stuff. There’s always a tension between people in the scene or objects in the scene. There’s a lot of romanticism attached to it, a lot of searching, influenced by reading books like Siddhartha or As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, books that were often about young people trying to go and find out what the world was all about.”
Within Tom’s art there is also a huge amount of humour – his much-loved Victorians Farting wallpaper being a great testament to this.
“I would also say that my art does sort of take the piss as well,” he says. “I don’t think art should always be taken seriously. I think there’s a lot of snottiness around it, and that needs to be stripped away.”
A tarot card project that Tom was commissioned to create saw him develop a deck – the famous ones being Death or Lovers – that was meant to be “quintessentially British”.
“I was really struggling as I started with historical figures, like Shakespeare and historical moments in time. But it was difficult for me, I had no attachment to it. So in the end, what I settled on was British drinking culture as a universal theme to bring everything together, something that everyone could understand.
“What I managed to do is turn each [card] into a pub crawl. You know, like the Justice card is all about that night where you got caught peeing on the street. Obviously, when we get to the Death card, it’s like the hangover of all hangovers. But then after that, things start getting better. And as we get to the end, to The Sun or The Star [cards] it’s all about relinquishing that desire to completely imbibe ourselves.
“I wanted it to have a timeless quality, so it sort of could be any part of the 20th century. And I also just wanted it to be fun as well. You know, it’s taking the piss as well out of our reliance on pub culture and the way we are to get through life.”
As part of Tom’s practice, he will create an Edition that will feature between 10 and 50 prints from the same carved lino block. But where many artists may snap the block to avoid repetition of the artworks, Tom allows customers to buy them should they want to.
“I’ve got a real thing about not holding on to stuff. I probably do everything the wrong way. I’m not very good at archiving and I don’t want to keep stuff.
“I think people have an idea of owning art, where they’re the only one who has it. So the idea of selling the blocks themselves was to give people this opportunity to pretty much own the original thing, the original object. And they’re really beautiful.”
Tom is well known for his wallpapers, such as Victorians Farting, Grecian Porn and If It Moves F*cking Shoot It, many of which made into high-profile locations, including the likes of renowned chef Mark Hix’s London restaurants.
“I think I’ve always just had a fascination with wallpaper and how it all connected and repeated,” he says. “I just like the idea of having functional art. I liked the idea of it being semi-permanent, like with a picture. You can obviously lift it off the wall and take it somewhere, but when you have a full feature wall, or you have a bathroom that’s completely coated in wallpaper, there’s something quite powerful about that.
“Once it’s on the wall, it’s stuck there, it’s not going anywhere. I like the idea that in years to come, there’d be layers and layers and at some point someone would peel back those layers, and Victorians Farting would emerge.”
Like in any good story, the main protagonist has a dilemma, a decision to make.
At the two ends of the spectrum, having wallpaper artwork that could stay in place for decades opposite the finite runs of prints makes Tom’s work even more fascinating.
“I think there’s always that push and pull, isn’t there?”, he says. “What do I want? Do I want to be forgotten? Or do I want to be remembered? I think I’m constantly straddling those lines.”
INFO: tommaryniak.com
INSTA: @tommaryniak
