Mark Thompson

“My primary drive as an artist is to try to make sense of my place in the world. Through the caprices and inconsistencies of memory, I hope to access a collective memory of place. I do not seek to illustrate aparticular place in point of fact, but rather develop and ultimately ‘make‘ a version of the world seen through the isolated lens of personal experience. The paintings are works of memory. This acts as a filter through which to retain only that which becomes important. The inevitable mix of my own history and experience fills in the gaps. The final image is therefore a remnant, the world distilled. My recent work is painted on a rigid support; either a birch or mdf panel or an Aluminium composite material, making them very stable and archivally sound. The paintings are made through an indirect process, the image and surface built up through successive layers of glazing and scumbling. These techniques are steeped in the history and tradition of painting, but allow me great emotional and physical freedom. Each layer imbues a tension, a creative destruction, in which chance and a degree of brinkmanship are invited into the process. The resulting paintings carry a technical narrative - a history of paint - that is all their own. They are built from time; their surfaces becoming a record of every flawed decision made right. The creative heroes that have influenced me over the years are varied and disparate, but the direct references come mostly from the fields of painting and photography. I am drawn to the collodion landscape photographs of Sally Mann, and the patient, time revealing images of Thomas Joshua Cooper and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The process of making is so apparent in the dedicated craft of each artist, yet the work gently transcends process and picks away at how we decode memories of place. My love of and belief in the practice of painting compel a broad interest in its history. My own work draws from the luminous surfaces of Vermeer to the destructive physicality of Nicola Samori and Adrian Ghenie, from the compositional ingenuity of Vincent Desiderio to the alchemical expansiveness of Anselm Kiefer. It is also impossible for me to talk about landscape painting without reference to Corot and the Barbizon School, whose search for light in amongst the three dimensionality of things engaged with both an unflinching reality, and a direct feel for the stuff of paint.”

~Mark Thompson