About

Bio

Joshua Thompson holds a BFA from the University of West Florida, 2005, and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2008, and has lived and worked in Seattle, Washington since 2013. His day job is as an art handling supervisor at Artech.  As for his personal art practice, he has worked across many mediums and processes throughout the years but continually comes back to oil painting as his primary focus. There are many things that filter into and out of his work, one common influence comes from natural and man-made structures both as objects and the processes by which they are formed. Building, growth, excavation, decomposition, destruction, symbiosis, temporality, birth, death, and rebirth are all frequent components that dictate process and metaphors within his work. Color is another important component to his paintings. Though some color theory does come into play, keeping an open palette allows him to paint more intuitively and in constant dialogue with the work. Also, utilizing both direct and indirect painting processes allows the paintings to guide him through realizing where they ultimately reside, created by but outside of him.

Artist Statement

In much of my more recent work I have found myself working to “construct” paintings in very 3-dimensional ways, much like relief sculpture, really thinking about mass in form. Given that I use oil paint, this presents some challenges with the time needed for layering and drying. I have found that I have to work with piles of paint mixed with alkyd and cold wax on the palette for many days or weeks to find a thicker consistency that is suitable for heavier knife and brush applications, up to a few inches thick, that will retain their shape better once applied. Leaving these piles alone for longer and creating slabs of paint on the palette to let sit for months allows for me to use atypical painting methods like those employed in assemblage, physically scraping off, cutting up, and pasting skinned-over to semi-dry paint onto the surface.

Other than thinking about where I may want the mass of these pieces to grow, I don’t think too specifically about what the finished work might look like. It’s through the process of painting and assembling that I slowly begin to envision where each piece, or similar groupings of pieces, may go. There’s a steady dialogue between myself and the work that’s driving each step and decision until everything works. It’s through this same type of process where the meaning begins to show itself a little more each time that I engage with the paintings. Often they are about my own personal experiences with and memories of nature and the landscape. I think that by also using oil paint as a vehicle of meaning, with its primal ingredients of fluid and stone, is to echo the idea of the human connection with nature and the Earth.