My creative practice thrives on unbounded exploration. I allow instinct to initiate the idea and discipline to bring it into being, The quotidian yellow pad is, in fact, my most vital tool, taking the first stirrings of form forward into the thumbnail sketch of something deserving of clay or canvas.
In recent years, my work has shifted from strictly figurative to include more abstract and nonobjective discovery, exploring how shape, void, and material interplay with human perception. Yet the elongated figure, which has long been my muse, still recurs, especially in my Environment Series, where a subject is presented within a narrative or suspended in a freeze-frame moment of tension.
I draw inspiration from myriad sources—books, nature, museums, city life—because I believe the artist’s charge is to remain alert. Ideas are not timestamped. They arrive when we are open. In this sense, I see my role not as creator alone, but as custodian of a thread—one that links past to present, tension to stillness, and form to meaning. I don’t see a finish line. My job is simply this: to stay inspired and to show up every day.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that my best work may still be ahead, waiting just around the next inevitable curve in this unpredictable and rewarding path.
— Tom Corbin
