Thomas Gaudynski grew up and spent time walking around Milwaukee, West Allis, and the Kinnickinnic River collecting and observing flora, fauna, rocks, and detritus. He was educated at various libraries, museums, bookstores, and record shops. Eschewing a career in the visual arts in his early twenties, he decided to paint with sound to the regret of those who thought he was talented. Subsequently, Gaudynski performed and recorded with any number of alternative sound artists, musicians, and professionals––some lesser and others better known than he. Along the way he published over thirty recordings and the Wisconsin Arts Board awarded him a Music Composition Fellowship. To pay the bills, he hand-wrote and typed his way through low-level documentation jobs before word processing was invented, and after, he served numerous design and marketing clients for many years although they were mostly wrong in both their objectives and methods. Gaudynski professed and curated alternative histories of twentieth-century art, music, film, and literature to anyone who would listen, including visitors to Woodland Pattern Book Center and students at a local art and design school. After losing interest in the state of recent audio culture, he returned to making visual art thirty-eight years later and now ruins paper making drawings of whatever he wants. He is married to Marly Gisser, a graphic designer and alternative spirituality pilgrim, and is father of Kira Gaudynski, a music theatre disciple and practitioner. Everything has influenced him.
