TOMMY WILSON – Destroy. Erase. Improve.
5 Minutes Alone with Tommy Wilson
Written by: Tom Wilson - Sense Music Media | Monday 9 August 2021
Moulded by the DIY sensibilities of the British Columbia punk scene, graphic artist Tommy Wilson has made a name for himself in the grind and powerviolence scene for fierce, subversive imagery and scorched-earth social commentary, which he feeds through vintage photocopiers and printers, allowing analogue fuzz and distortion to erode the artwork. His posters are the visual equivalent of squealing guitar feedback, and full disclosure, I think they’re amazing. I guess we have more in common than just our names. He spoke to me from Vancouver.
Pictured: Poster commissions by Tommy Wilson
Did you go to art school?
Yeah, I did go to a design school for, like, a year and a half. I did drawing, video editing, photography, Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign classes, so I know a good chunk of the Adobe programs.
How did you fall into doing this? What was your first exposure? Was it just going to gigs and falling in love with the bill posters?
Yeah. I grew up in a small town that’s about an hour away called Squamish. There were older punks there putting on shows, so the first poster I saw was this crazy xerox collage poster of skulls and skateboarding stuff, right? So I was pretty interested. I was kind of into punk before that. I was into it pretty early, right? [I got into it] kind of right after that. I was really into skateboarding too, so I would rip a page out of a skateboard magazine and draw logos and stuff, and just made posters for fun. I got my hands on a CHARLES BRONSON CD when I was about thirteen, and I just loved the design aesthetic in that. Aaron Cometbus, too, and old CRIMPSHRINE CDs too. The first couple of CDs I had were CHARLES BRONSON and CRIMPSHRINE. I was really into the halftone, janky Letraset-type stuff. Then I started booking shows when I was fifteen, and obviously I had to make posters for that. So I’ve been making posters since I was thirteen or fourteen now. I’m thirty-one now.
Pictured: “Social Commentary” by Tommy Wilson
What are your tools of the trade? Are you using scalpels?
I try to do something different every time. I think, if I had a really uniform set of things, if everything was just photocopied twice and put back into Photoshop, I’d probably get bored of it pretty quick. I’ve got a bunch of Letraset that I’ll take an X-Acto knife to and peel some off the back before I set it down, or I’ll just set it in Photoshop. I’ve got, like, five printers. Just a lot of type manipulation, which really comes from the CHARLES BRONSON influence, I suppose.
Help me out here, because I’ve never actually used it. What’s Letraset?
Letraset? That’s like rub-off letters, like they had before computers. I bought some off this lady off Craigslist, and she was like, “Yeah, I used to draw maps, and we didn’t have digital type back then.” So you just take a pencil and rub it off, and she was like, “Yeah, you need to use graph paper to make it straight,” and I was like, “No, no, it’s not going to be straight!” She was kind of weirded-out by that, but it works for me! Also, I like to combine … you can use two or three different programs for a poster. I’ll set it in Photoshop, print it, scan it, then put it in Illustrator and very quickly twist things. Because in Photoshop you have to cut it out and put it on a separate layer, whereas in Illustrator … you have layers, but you can do a lot more with what you have.
Pictured: Tommy Wilson and his design influences
Who are some of your favourite designers? Have there been any that really hit you, and changed the way you thought about art?
John Yates has to be the first person who comes to mind when you ask that question. It was sometime last year … I’d seen a bunch of John’s stuff, and had CDs that he designed when I was younger, but I wasn’t a super graphic design dork at the time, like I am now. It was Josh Lord, who’s a painter from Australia. We were talking over Instagram, and he was like, “Man, you remind me a lot of John Yates.” He showed me his book, and I actually went and bought it. That really changed the game [for me] … It’s just offensive, and political … It was really inspiring to be more out-there with your ideas. He doesn’t fucking hold back ever, right? That was someone who changed the game pretty drastically for me, in terms of stuff like subject matter.
Talking about being subversive, one of my favourite works of yours … I don’t know if you title [your works], but it’s just an inverted crucifix with “Fuck your faith”, and it looks like you have photocopied that about fifty bajillion times. It looks amazing.
That was really fun. That was a VACCINE song that’s about ten or fifteen seconds long. It’s amazing. I was just listening to that a lot … I made it in about five seconds, and just ripped it. Like I said, I have, like, five different printers. Someone gave me the idea. They were like, “Have you ever just ripped a poster through every printer and seen what happens?” … That one came out good. It’s fun to experiment and try different shit every time. I was kind of on the fence about that. I was like, “This is a little offensive, right?” But nah … People loved that one, so that was fun to do.
Pictured: “Subversive Destruction” by Tommy Wilson
I can see your work getting more intense and degraded and old-school until it’s just going to be a dot-matrix printout of a frowny face. [Laughs]
Yeah, that could happen! All these fax machines do something different, so I’m still learning how to make it look as bad as possible. It could always look worse, man! [Laughs]
Where are you finding this tech from? Are you finding them at thrift shops and shit?
The first one I got was off Facebook Marketplace. My mum picked it up. They were like, “Oh, it’s free.” That’s the one that gives these really shitty horizontal lines through it, and also destroys type. Sometimes I can’t even use it, because it’s so beat up, but that one’s good. I’ve been using it a lot lately … A couple of months ago, I was out of thermal paper – the old fax rolls. I went on Craigslist to find that, and someone posted “five free rolls, and a free fax machine.” So I was like, “Fuck me!” I went and picked that up, so now I have three fax machines, and they all do different stuff. One of them will just warp letters and stuff. One gives you the horizontal lines, and the latest one I got … it absolutely mangles type, but it also leaves ink blotches within everything. They’re all so old and beat up, and they’ve been sitting in people’s garages for a couple of decades before I scooped them up.
Pictured: Lynndie England after her trial, and Tommy's portrait of her
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”
Oh, hell yeah, dude.
One of my favourite pieces of yours is your portrait of Lynndie England, the military police private who was convicted of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib … What can you tell me about that piece? What spurred you on to make that image?
Because it was the pandemic, and I had shit-tonnes of free time, I was watching a lot of Guantanamo Bay documentaries, and was looking up stuff. GitMo’s pretty fucked, man. It’s very sketchy. I guess I was pretty young when all the scandal happened, so I missed that, but I was watching a lot of Guantanamo Bay stuff. On Wikipedia, that picture is fair use, so I was like, “Fucking right – I’ll have at her!” I just decided to start talking about it and making collages and shit out of it. I don’t know if you saw the process video, but I wheat-pasted it, stapled her face … it was kind of like a “Fuck you, Lynndie England.” She is a fucking idiot, so I have no regrets about that one! [Laughs]
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Tommy is available for commissions.
