The first time I saw Adam Thompson’s paintings was when he showed some small landscapes at the Dragonfly Gallery in 2000. I remember being so surprised when Holly Alaimo, who owned the gallery, told me that the artist was 18 years old.
He spent summers with his grandparents at the Campground cottage they bought in 1952. Thompson’s love of Oak Bluffs remains a constant presence in his work. Many of the paintings in this exhibition that opens at the Field Gallery on August 11 are set in a very recognizable Oak Bluffs.
His work has the feeling of a memoir, or a diary of experiences, in iconic Vineyard landscapes. He chooses his subjects for just that reason. Although he knows his subjects/landscapes through long association, he takes photographs to work from when he returns to his New York City life. He will alter the time of day, rearrange the composition by editing what is really there, or combine the big shapes into more abstract patterns. “I like using the iconic images, but as an arrangement of elements,” Thompson explained.
A painting called “Cadillac” reduces the car to a tire and a bit of metal bumper as tantalizing as a Victorian lady’s ankle, leaving most of it the large, mysterious rectangle under an electric blue tarp. While the blue shape fills the foreground, it sits in a sweeping confluence of thickly brushed oil paint that forms itself into a tree-and-sky-filled background. Except for an opening in the treeline that catches your eye, and leads to where? What is back there?
A painting needn’t spell everything out at once. It’s nighttime as you approach a “Blue Door” with only a porch light to show the way. On the right side, the painting continues into another of Thompson’s ambiguous, what’s-back-there enigmas. It’s probably nothing more than a place to park or to stroll along toward the sea, but it invites speculation.
Another is called “January.” It shows a row of bare trees and Campground cottages shuttered for the winter. The first two houses offer a warm yellow ochre and the grayed-teal line of a porch, but the rest of the painting abandons any color as the houses dissolve into a blur of snow in this mostly monochromatic painting. I like white-on-white compositions, as they are never all white, but mixtures of subtle, softened grays: blue gray, dull plum, faded green or ochre. They are a challenging exercise to paint.
“Union Chapel” stands at the end of a street lined with cars, trees, and brushstrokes at dramatic angles that lead to the structure, waiting patiently for the viewer’s eye to alight.
“North and State” is one of those examples that proves an artist can make something wonderful out of nothing. The painting is definitely a worthy effort; I don’t mean to imply otherwise, just that there isn’t much there. What is there is masterful. It’s a composition of light. Bright light and shadows are the subject, using a road sign on an up-Island byway, some trees, and a field as something for that light to play against. The color and values are brilliant, the paint juicy, the brushwork delicious.
One of Thompson’s night paintings is “Dusk in Ocean Park.” It is all one sinuous, backlit shape that continues across the surface of the painting. A tall Victorian on the left, a cottage on the right, a tree in between, one dark mass. A gold and orange sky describes its outline.
Of the rest of the paintings, they are mostly of the type of Vineyard day anyone would wish for. There is hardly any traffic, and no horn-honking drivers, in the cars that pass through “Five Corners.” There isn’t a line outside “Gio’s” or “O.B. Theaters.” The ferry approaches on a smooth sea. The artist has endless beaches all to himself.
I admire the painterly brushmarks that Thompson leaves for us to examine. He mixes his paint directly on the canvas, so there is also the effect of color separate or blended as the brush moves it across the surface. He says he embraces the painterliness of the paint while deciding just how much he wants to show the viewer. The warm orange-red-brown underpainting he uses gives him a middle value to work on, rather than the harsh white of a commercially gessoed surface. On his palette are laid out ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, cerulean blue, cadmium red medium and light, cadmium orange, cadmium yellow deep and light, yellow ochre, and titanium white. His paintings are small, like an intimate letter you will examine again and again, to reread, and rediscover its subtleties.
You might be surprised to learn that Adam Thompson is a renowned cartoonist, familiar to readers of the New Yorker. He teaches at Brooklyn College. He has written art reviews in several publications. Although he was a competent painter as a young man, he pursued another career path. This show marks his return to oil painting.
Thompson worked at the Field Gallery in the summers of 2003 and 2004, and has maintained a friendship with gallery director Jhenn Watts ever since. She has monitored his progress as he began painting again. She said, “I’ve seen his New Yorker cartoons, and they are very witty. I think he brings some of that wit to his paintings.”
Adam Thompson will be sharing the gallery with Traeger di Pietro and Judy Bramhall. Dates are August 11 to 24. An opening reception for the artists is planned for Saturday, August 12.