Hi, my name is Thea Wolfe and I’m currently living and making art on Maui.  This is the 8th state i’ve called home and the first “about me” I’ve written.

People I meet always ask what i do. I say I’m an artist, to which they usually respond by asking again what it is I do. I guess they are looking for me to describe my works.

I don’t really want to describe my art to people.  For me it’s never been just one thing.  The thing that I call my job is actually an entire identity, not a choice I made.  But if you want me to give you a loose chronology of my “work”, here it is.

My parents say I was always an artist.  They noticed an early talent for drawing, and always guided me strongly toward visual art, which they believed was my calling. I chose music instead, putting most of my creative energy into writing songs and playing my guitar.  I carried journals everywhere, which I filled quickly with drawings, poems and songs-in-progress.  My initial move after high school was to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music, but the academic approach to making music wasn’t my cup of tea and I eventually withdrew to focus on my work with various bands.  I also began an apprenticeship as a tattoo artist. 

It was a magical chapter full of magical people and a lot of defining challenges, as well.  I was full-time at the tattoo shop (as well as working a second job), going to practice, playing shows and recording an album.  At home I was teaching myself to paint.  I quickly realized that the quiet and aloneness I felt when working in solitude provided the deep inner peace I was truly seeking.  

I decided to go back to school for fine art and moved to Seattle, where I began painting commissioned portraits and going to school.  

I graduated from Cornish in 2007 with a BFA in Painting and Sculpture.   I was highly inspired and very prolific right out of the gate, and began throwing my own art parties in an attempt to show my work most authentically.  The years that followed were a blur of paint and starlight and hardwood floors that increasingly looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.  It was a highly magical time, which I later made a book, Year of the Wrong, about.

During that same period, I decided I ought to make my favorite band, Ween, a coloring book.  It was a joke and was meant as a love letter, but they loved it so much they published it and sold it on their website.  Amazingly, it sold very well.  This was the time in my life that I was able to stop taking commissions, a big milestone and huge sense of accomplishment for me.  I really dislike doing commissions and would actually rather pick up a non-art job than take one so if you’re wondering: no- i do not take commissions.  But I have a lot of extremely talented artist friends who do and I would be more than happy to make referrals!

Anyway, as the Ween Coloring Book sold, folks started talking, a few people wrote some very nice things about me and magical people started to open magical doors.  The best part of this time was that I started doing pop-up/off-road art shows around the country.

This period was defined by magic hitting me in a series of massive waves, tsunamis even.  When the onslaught ended, the hangover was awful.  If I’m being honest, I felt completely drained.  I didn’t think I was going to paint anymore.

As stories go, my nose for magic lead me to Los Angeles and I found a new incredible chapter unfolding.  I began immersing myself in martial arts and fully embraced the pretty plastic zoo of Hollywood.  The magic tide was back, washing over me in new and different ways.  I was still receiving royalties from The Ween Coloring Book and wound up being welcomed by a magical gym, which was comprised of world class fighters and world class pole dancers.  This gym became my literal home and the gorgeous and interesting people connected to it changed my life.

Eventually, mixed martial arts lead me back to Seattle where I finished up my competition years earlier than I expected to.  I certainly didn’t fall out of love with fighting but have grown greatly in a desire to honor my body, which I have and continue to ask a lot of.  I’m also in a time where struggle and resistance are no longer in my path.  I still absolutely adore MMA, though, and always try to watch the fights.  In the years since competing I have shifted my physical focus to snowboarding, mountain biking, climbing and, since moving to Hawaii, snorkeling.

So here I am, today.  It’s been a few years since I had a show and although you wouldn’t know it, I have actually made a lot of art.  Many of these are pieces I’ve sold directly to collectors without bothering to document, or are pieces simply left abandoned in our totally unexpected relocation to Maui.  I have always been liberated by letting go, but if it is of any interest to you, there are vast gaps between the work you see here and the work I’ve actually done- much of which has gone undocumented, been intentionally destroyed or was simply too personal to show.

As I get older I am realizing new perspectives in the value in documentation, not as the objects these documents become, but as windows into a process, value system and identity. 

I will never claim to be a great painter or wield any type of conceptual genius.  historically, i’ve been the first to call my work shit and throw it in a dumpster (so many times). What I will claim is that I am an experienced and dedicated intronaut and will always be involved in some type of art and making based the many sacred interactions that define both my humanness and efforts to transcend that fact.  I can’t say exactly what forms that will take, but promise you will always find me somewhere doing different things with the same passion, force and dedication that I do it all.  I’m a girl of simple purpose: freedom, creation and the summoning of magic.