BIO

Quentin “Shplinton” Thomas is an artist, illustrator, graphic designer, and curator who has exhibited in galleries and museums within the L.A. and Inland Empire areas. With a psychedelic color palette caught somewhere between surrealist philosophy, AbEx painting, and skate + surf culture with a bit of art school kid tossed in, there is an entry point for a wide variety of audiences in his work.

Perhaps like you, Shplinton began his relationship with art on notebooks in school. “A big part of my work evolved in classrooms I did not want to be in,” he explains. Viewing Shplinton’s work, you can still see the mind of a distracted creative spilled out across the face, his signature “triangle pointillism” wandering with his thoughts and fine point pen through vibrant blobs.

While almost every artist on earth shares a relationship with paper, the delicate surface was mobile enough for him to roll it up and carry it on his bike as a child, and so it began as his medium of choice. He still gets around on his bike, and he still creates a shit ton of pieces that can be rolled up so that they can travel with him. This nomadic lifestyle defines his entire process. A piece may be started at his home in Koreatown, but it will be furthered in a studio Downtown, and finished at a retail shop in Venice. He is a rolling stone, always the trusted voice to know about the hippest and most intelligent art experiences around town, and his work reflects that.

These surroundings inform his subject matter and mate-rials themselves. He will scribble with watercolor pencils

and graphite before spilling paint, coffee, sugar, salt, water, acetone, and whatever other chemical cocktail is present in the studio he's found on his nomadic search for a new workspace. All of these substances are commonplace in his work, because they are commonplace in the world we live in. If you can find it in your kitchen, he will paint with it, because he has no problem painting in your kitchen.

Characters jump out from the pages of his paintings – the pop pieces as well as the surreal abstract ones – because they are jumping off the screen while he gives cartoons and ultra-conscious docs equal playtime while holding brush in hand. His work is a reflection of himself – a response to the world we are all creating for him through our disorder.

The paintings tell him when they are done, and he takes note by tracing their commentaries with tiny triangles wrapping around weird amorphic shapes of spilled pigment. He can say it best: “I played with it and it was something I was happy with.”

Written by Jacob Patterson, Director, Think Tank Gallery

SURFRIDER Foundation 10th Anniversary International Surfing Day w/ Deus Ex Machina

Shplinton for Dude, Monsters! at Think Tank Gallery

RVCA X Surferxblood "Generation Surf"

Act Social Art Show at Active Santa Monica

Surferxblood X Transworld Surf X Summer Tease The Good Life Rooftop Party