Statement of the Artist

The arts have, are and always will be the refuge of peace, beauty and the truth of being. They are to civilization what water is to oceans and without which there can be no life worth living at all. Its enemy has, is and always will be the lies, ugliness and brutality generated from the unconscious drives of human ignorance. Against these odds, art and the artist strive in their brave effort to be and become free both for themselves and for the world.

This website is a compilation of such effort that spans more than thirty years. It can therefore be understood as a document as complex as both the artist, Tom Loret, and the cultural times in which the work unfolds. In both cases, it is always the interplay of light and dark that brings the art, the person and society into focus. Expressed as joy and sorrow, truth and lies, love and fear, my purpose has been to look at and comment on what I find to be the most essential, crucial and intrinsic issues of life.

Athena

Throughout it all I have asked only two questions: What does it take to be free? What does it take to love? But to ask these questions while still wrapped in the body and mind of a person who is himself familiar with crisis at the same time as growing up and working in a society continuously at war with itself and the world is no easy matter.

How does one learn these answers? Where does one go to emulate living examples? Where are the academies where one learns to settle the chasm between the principles of peace, freedom and love as advertised and the never ending practices that include daily horrors of war, repression, incarceration, censorship, religious bigotry, racial hatreds, gender inequalities, illiteracy, economic poverty, non-stop media, social, and civil violence, environmental collapse, massive public apathy, government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police, and the breakdown of every institution heretofore designed and trusted to uplift and educate ourselves and our fellow Americans?

This inquiry has made me into who and what I am, the artist and writer that I present to you. Thank you for taking the time to browse and I hope your visit is rewarding.

Sincerely,
Tom Loret
Twentynine Palms, CA
January, 2012