infectiously brilliant

Tom's latest creation: The New Fish Car

This morning i learned that a brilliant man lost his life at ocean beach yesterday. Tom Kennedy, art car genious, artist extraodinaire, inspirer of light and bringer of love was pulled down by the riptide yesterday afternoon. throughout the day today, nearly 70 people have weighed in on their memories of tom, the sadness of the loss, and the utter joy he inspired in their lives. you can read them all here at laughingsquid.com. a tragic loss but what a measure of a lived well lived. 

I met tom just a month ago out at the box shop. bright eyed, i started going out the shop *finally* after many years of wanting to work with metal. running around the yard, i met haideen (his wife) and tom one sunday afternoon. haideen was in the process of making a gorgeous orange hippo for one cute lil’ 2 yr old lulu, and tom was busy at work on one of his many gorgeous bells. the bell he’d transported to the shop that day was tall and lizard green and stood about 6 feet. the bell itself is encircled by a heart of spiraled metal. the intricacy, the detail, and, oh, that sound! the gorgeous, deep, resonating sound that that bell made. he said he’d made one like it for his folks and that he and haideen were planning to box this one up and send it off to her folks. i was fascinated by the work–and by the joy and light that emanated from both tom and haideen. 

last weekend, at a long FLG work day of packing up mutopia, i saw tom again. this time, while standing over the bbq table, i asked him about the bells. he told me all about the process, from beginning to end with all the steps in between–the practice, the experimentation, the evolution. he spoke with such relish, such excitement, such passion about the discovery. i told him about the project i’ve been mulling over–my first attempt at metal sculpture. in those 10 minutes we shared over pork sammiches, i got it–everything that everyone has written about him today on that post. my friend, mimi, has this great phrase she uses when she talks about people with such tremendous creative joy like Tom: infectiously brilliant. 

Though my glimpse of him was so very brief, it will always be remembered as one of those great moments in life when you know: Yes! Of course! It’s all possible. All of it. Thank you for being infectiously brilliant, Tom. You will be missed.