JustArts Gallery
Tulsa, OK
Elevating the creative voices of people confined to carceral institutions across the US.
MessageCollection: Thomus Manos
Hi, my name is Thomus Manos. I started my journey as an artist after I came to prison in 1997 with an LWOP sentence, and started tattooing. To not get in trouble for having the ink and drawings in my cell I had to get a permit to order curio items, with that permit I was allowed to go to the hobby shop and enter a world of woodworking, jewelry making, airbrushing, models and miniatures. Since I’d lost the option to have the cars and trucks I dreamed of, I figured I'd build and paint models of them to look like the ones I wished I could have. That led to me learning how to airbrush, which I was able to turn into a way to have a store on my shelves by making cards to sell. One day while looking through one of my cellies’ WarHammer magazines for tattoo patterns I noticed how they were making their miniatures into new poses by using modeling putty, and I asked my cellie if I could try to build this big demonlord thing for his army -- well that hooked me! I loved it, and from there I moved through most of the hobbies ending on leather work, when unfortunately our hobby program was shut down. Many years later while at gym one of my friends had a giant dragon he was sending out and I was super stoked thinking hobby shop must have opened back up! Nope, he was making sculptures with a mixed media and gave me his (basic) secret sauce to creating his sculptures… And I was off to try it out, and the rest is history…Over a decade later I've found I can create pretty much anything I can envision, and that’s my limitation. During the pandemic I was running out of glue and saw on Ancient Aliens that rice was used to make glue that's still holding together today, and had to pivot to using the rice we can buy on store to make my sculptures, just using store bought glue where I felt it was absolutely necessary. Now I create my art as an outlet for my mind and hands, and a way to help my family out in the small ways that I can. My (basic) mixed media sauce, includes but is not limited to: Glue, tissue paper, paper towels, foot powder, rice paste, Qtips, writing paper tablet backs, acrylic paint, beads, bic pens, pill bottles (or any other bottle we have on store), or any other items I can see to create the vision that’s in my head. Literally my imagination is my limit…
