Richard Thompson

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain,
then there is.  – Donavan

In the world around me I may see a flash of color, a particular form of a tree, the sudden movement of a bird, the march of a squadron of clouds, or the pale blue vapor trail of a passing jet, and each moment or event may become the reason for a big brush stroke, the arch of a curve, a shape, a color, a line or the plan for a whole composition.

The world enters through my eye, travels back out through my hand, reformed by my brain and informed by my heart.

My paintings create the place where all this digesting comes to rest.

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Statement for Living Here, new work from 2006 to 2008

It’s early in the morning on a January day in 2006. The weather is cold and overcast. I am alone in my pickup driving on an empty highway somewhere between Denver and St. Louis. On this day, I am in the first stages of a cross-country journey that will become one of three such trips that I will take in this year.

Beyond me a pale, thin grey sky rests on the razor straight horizon line. Below the horizon the land is a muddy blend of every gray possible. I see iron red olive brown grey trees, mars black, yellow ochre and flesh pink dirt and rocks, and sooty grey, mustard yellow, chalk colored houses all out there in a giant landscape still life. I occasionally glimpse a flash of red or the indecipherable form of something colored a thick blue or a chrome yellow piece of fabric stuck to a pitch black twist of wire.

Three days behind me is my Oregon childhood home that has become “our place” since Dad’s death. We have spent the last two years there tending to his comfort, cleaning and repairing the old farmhouse, imagining what it would be like for us to live there forever, like my dad. Born in that house, he lived and worked there everyday for 93 years until we finally had to move him to a care facility. Moving dad was second hardest job I have ever done. Don’t ask me about the hardest.

While in Oregon I used a small shop for a studio and finished a body of work begun in New York. As I painted, I became tenderly aware of how autobiographical the work was becoming, and I was eager to conclude these paintings and step outside my self again.

Now, with dad gone, our money running out, the paintings framed and sent to Texas, I am returning to the job I left behind in New York. I had thought that job was completely over, but circumstances were pulling us back. Our house in New York remained unsold, my studio unused, and I was feeling undone about the whole circumstance we had left there.

So this January I drove and drove. The winter landscape spread out before me like a vast still life. Houses, barns, and fence lines appeared like objects on a wide lumpy tabletop. I passed mile after mile of bits and pieces of family farm buildings separated from neighbors by discreet distances. Occasionally, vertical grain elevators or various types of towers broke the horizon line, but it was the horizontal weight of the essential flatness that consumed me. All around me was a wide-open, simple, above/below space that for all its openness remained flattened obscuring its human depth. In all of this big still life, one focus, one house, one tree, one hill became but another piece of a much larger composition.

As I drove, I drew. My right hand scrawled pictures and notes recording my immediate visual thoughts. Shaky little plans emerged for paintings and sculptures conceived as “Prairie Horizons” and “Prairie Still Lifes” and images of the landscape cut up and restacked, reordered as “Stacked Horizons.”

With each new drawing, my dad’s death, my complex feelings about what to do with the family home, my still uncertain thoughts about my last group of paintings are replaced with new art possibilities. Within the year, renewed and recharged, I will embark on new paintings inspired by this landscape.