About Trish Thompson
ART
After attending the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) for less than a year, intending to major in Fashion Design. I was encouraged by one of my professors to focus on painting and apply to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. I was honored to be accepted to the oldest institution for fine art education in the nation and was awarded a half scholarship. It was a fantastic experience being taught by and exposed to artists such as Will Barnet, Morris Blackburn, Arthur DeCosta, Tony Greenwood, Oliver Grimley, Homer Johnson, Ben Kamihira, Jimmy Lueders, Dan Miller, Liz Osborne, and Louis Sloan.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with scholarship to study painting, 1971-74
Philadelphia College of Art, 1970
Exhibitions:
American Academy in Rome, 2003
Exhibit 231 gallery, Philadelphia, 2004
The Gallery at The Mills, Philadelphia, 2005
[See FASHION for the years 1976-2002]
The journey from the business of fashion to the practice of art has at times been effortless and at other times arduous.
I spent 2002-2003 at the American Academy in Rome with my husband, a Rome prize winner. It was a life-changing experience to be part in an intimate community of artists and scholars. It helped me become committed again to pursuing the path of making art.
Working on canvas in oil was the medium I used most while at PAFA; I enjoyed it but find there is something about the combination of watercolor, gouache and egg tempera with graphite, pastel and other mediums that have a more sensual and exciting quality. The potential outcome is less predictable, and I find those accidental discoveries more interesting than the often structured and predetermined directions in which working in a single medium often leads.
Observation is my passion and a tool for beginning the creative process. My compositions are inspired by real and imagined universes; much of the time I take my cues from the work itself and how its parts fit together like a puzzle with unrealized possibilities. I trust the way nature and patterns in life are the ultimate influence. I often start out with a photograph I have taken or a screen shot from a film I have made; the moment that was captured is what I find provocative. I will print selections of these images and paint or draw into them and or combine images into collage. The instinctive connections between one shape and another are something of a puzzle that works out with exploration and experimentation. A friend referred to my work as a landscape of the mind.
I think of it as a creative stream of conciousness in which I build and create a new tension, structure, space and sensibility. Ambiguity of space and perspective are elements I use in much of my work to create images that immerse the viewer in unique compositional relationships, but wholly defined by his or her point of view.
Recently I have been attracted to the idea of an arrested state of decay and all its mysterious beauty, patterns and the way in which it retains a complex yet organic order.