Sometimes you meet a guy who makes you rethink all the worst parts of your life, and makes you wonder how many curses may be blessings in disguise. Marcus Thomas is one of those guys.
When my friend Carol and I met him in early March, he told us he had just celebrated the 36th anniversary “of the day that put me in this chair.”
Marcus Thomas
“Celebrated” might seem an unusual word to describe the accident that broke his neck, fractured his skull, and confined him to a wheelchair, permanently robbed of the ability to move any part of his body below the neck.
But the more you talk to him, the more you see that this is not a man simply doing his best to keep a stiff upper lip in the face of disaster. Instead, to Marcus the moment that anybody in his right mind might consider a tragedy was truly a gift — a rebirth into the man he was always meant to be, but who was ironically limited by his lack of physical limitations before the accident.
As a young man, Marcus was an outstanding athlete, but he bounced from game to game with no plan in mind. He gave college a try, but lacking the patience for it, he dropped out after two years. Eventually he returned to school and earned a degree in Recreation, and he took a job working at a ski lodge. His future, he felt, would be full of zip lines, kayaks, bikes and mountain trails.
But all that changed in an instant on the ski trails.
A quadriplegic since March 3, 1986, due to a skiing accident, Marcus Thomas awoke from a three-week coma and asked his live-in girlfriend, Anne, to marry him. And being every bit as courageous as Marcus is, Anne accepted, knowing that she would have to do virtually everything for him for the rest of their lives.
Before the accident, both Marcus and Anne were exceptional physical specimens whose lives revolved around athletics of all sorts—baseball, kayaking, hiking, skiing, and even triathlon. After the accident, he had to relearn actions as simple and automatic as breathing.
“I died at age 26,” he says, “and was reborn in a wheelchair. I had to relearn life from a different perspective.” The path was long, agonizing, and daunting because, frankly, “starting new again was getting old.”
And then, late that year, Anne and his sister came home from a shopping trip with a whimsical gift for Marcus — a Crayola watercolor kit with a paintbrush modified for him to hold in his mouth.
It was a moment that spawned a rebirth that today causes Marcus to “celebrate” the tortured path his life has taken.
Beginning by painting a whimsical Christmas card that looks as if it might have been made by a 10-year-old, Marcus learned quickly. Completely self-taught, his skills advanced enough that he was able to paint 12 watercolors of birds, which he and Anne made into a calendar. He produced another the following year called “Spread Your Wings,” and within three years he was turning out watercolors of eagles that look as realistic as a photograph, titled “Rewarding Journey.”
Over time, as his talent grew, his style grew as well to include avant-garde, surrealistic, or magical realism works. But always, he returned to images of freedom and beauty, most notably in his paintings of birds. By the early 2000’s, he moved from watercolor to more difficult oils, which he mixes himself with brushes and tools he holds in his mouth.
Anne, of course, helps him by setting up and moving canvases around, but Marcus does all else from a specially designed wheelchair controlled through movements of his head and plastic tubes into which he breathes to turn, tilt, or navigate.
A decade ago, while working on a 25-year retrospective of his life since the accident, he painted “How Time Flies,” a surrealistic painting depicting a raven (the “trickster” god of many native American tribes) flying off with a snatched pocket watch dangling from a gold chain. The watch falls apart, the inner workings spilling out and falling through the air. At the center of the watch is a blue eye — the eye of Marcus himself.
It is, you might say, a metaphor of his life: Things are snatched away. Things fall apart. Things fly free. All of them intimately connected.
Today, Marcus and Anne Thomas spend their time traveling to art fairs, where his works demand high prices and utmost respect, not only for their masterful beauty but also for the inspiration his life brings to others.
We first encountered him two years ago, at a “quick-draw” artistic challenge, where artists painted throughout a day, with their works then auctioned off with proceeds going to charity. I wanted to talk to him then, but that was impossible because…well, let’s just say that he of all people has earned the right to say: “I can’t talk while I work.”
That’s why it was such a pleasure this March to finally meet him face to face, to talk to him and to Anne at his side, and to tell them both how much we appreciate not only his art but also their remarkable journey together. We parted from them with three of Marcus’s prints and a heavy full-color book of his works.
And more than that, we left with a new appreciation of our own life journeys.
All of it.
Even the tragedies.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
