Bio
My name is Thomas Shortliffe. I was born in Toronto December 23rd, 1973 and have been living in Montreal for the last 12 years. I am a French and Canadian citizen. I have always been involved in art from the earliest age. My parents pushed me into ballet for 7 years, then piano, and acting until I joined a rock band in my teenage years. Eventually, I discovered painting and found that this medium was a way to encapsulate all the other arts into a single flash of image.
I discovered painting following the breakup of an important relationship and I’ve been painting ever since that time 12 years ago. The way that I found painting seemed to come quite naturally to me at the time and I never really questioned how or why it seemed to make me feel better. Later on, my studies in psychology led me to discover the emerging field of art therapy and I realized that this was my calling. I wanted to share with others, the secret power of art to heal, motivate and enhance personal growth.
My work then, is motivated by all things related to psychology, spirituality and the human condition. My influences in painting are Savador Dali, Chuck Close, Chagall, Rembrandt, Emily Carr, Marcel Duchamp, Soutine, Heidi Taillfer. My influences in terms of the content of my images, are the psychodynamic theorists like Freud, the Self theorists like Jung, the behaviourists like Skinner and the Cognitive behaviourists like Aaron Beck.
My painting has been described as Symbolist, Surrealist, and a series of Vignettes. I’m comfortable with the term Symbolist to describe what I do for I am in search of the meaning of symbols in a futile attempt to describe their meaning with words. Of course, the very definition of symbolic implies non-verbal, and yet, I still try to explain the meaning of the content of my work, with very little success. I’ve always said that if I could tell you what my paintings mean, I would not have to paint at all.