Thom Bierdz and the need to create
12 Mar 2019.

You’d think after 20 years of conducting interviews that I would get it right every time. But this morning was a disaster. I arranged to speak to actor Thom Bierdz from his home in the woods in California. We were speaking about his artwork, and it was a terrific interview. Then we hung up and I realized I had forgotten to turn on the tape recorder.

Luckily, Thom’s artwork speaks for itself. The former soap star, who played Phillip Chancellor the Third on The Young and the Restless back in the '90s, lives an idyllic life in a gorgeous cabin, surrounded by dogs and nature. In the past 15 years, Thom has taken up the paint brush, and boy, has he been busy, literally producing dozens of paintings in various styles. Now, he has compiled all his work into not one but five different volumes. Get ready for Bierdz Art. The five volumes are titled Landscapes, Expressionism, Nudes in Trees, Portraits, and Pop. They constitute a major collection of artwork, and my head was spinning from so much eye candy.

I can’t quote, but I can paraphrase from our interview. Tom told me he started doing artwork as a child and has always kept it up. In the past decade he has completed numerous commissions, mostly portraits. He’s done gallery shows, which he said are great for press but not so great for sales. He is aware that gay artwork is tough to sell. The buyer has to be rich, have wall space, and not be closeted. If I was rich, I would buy the half dozen paintings of lumberjacks, inspiring depictions of machismo in action. But then there is also the celebrity work. Tom did a series of celebrity fantasy gay couples that is both cheeky and irreverent. 

Some of his expressionism is in turns harrowing and ravishing. The painting of a bunch of chairs organized in a circle lends itself to multiple interpretations. The most haunting of all his paintings shows Bill Cosby as both a young man and as an aging rapist, and it served to remind me of how incredibly cute and sexy the young Cosby was in the '60s. There are also paintings of buffalo, centaurs, angels, dogs, cabins, weird made-up creatures, nudes, and some abstracts. Throughout our interview, Thom kept saying how important it was for him to create, how he is driven to do so.

Thom Bierdz sounds pretty happy, and why not. He’s healthy, good looking, lives in a place that most of us fantasize about living in, and he’s doing work that fulfills him. Now all he needs to do is find his audience. The hard cover version of his books are priced around $60, but he has also made them available as $3 digital downloads. For a mere three bucks you can look at some truly original artwork. We talked about other famous actors who paint as a hobby, like Elke Sommer, Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, Viggo Mortensen and George W. Bush, to name just a few. We can now add Thom Bierdz’s name to that list.