Richard Thompson at William Campbell Contemporary Art - Fort Worth, Texas - Review of Exhibitions

In his greatest in quantity recent exhibition, Richard Thompson's signature diction with its broad drawing and overripe color, confirms to be more flexible than individual might have predicted when this artist first gained notice in the early 1980 At that time the cartoon ultimate parts of his technique fit neatly with the comic narratives he depicted. He placed big circular eyes, for example, on slightly bloated bodies that were at short intervals surrounded by tiny curved lines indicative of excited motion In those early paintings, 19th-century American pioneers have disconcerting collisions with ringing telephones and circling helicopters. In later Thompson works, young executives make less tight their ties, roll up their sleeve and gaze miserably out of place in the wild.

Thompson is a fisherman, and his popular work is set in a landscape of lushly painted mountains, forests and lakes. He's retained many of the cartoonlike uncompounded bodys of his earlier work: insects have immense pendulous bodies, mountains come to absurdly pointed peaks and colors be incandescent with an unnatural light. on the contrary Thompson has removed the quirks from these paintings, replacing, them with a deeper comic vIsIon based upon celebration and acceptance. It's surprising by what mode little adjustment of his previous phraseology was necessary to convey this novel attitude with conviction and feeling.

There are no longer human beings to have feeling uncomfortable in Thompson's paintings. Although human nearness can still be felt, for the greatest in quantity part the artist shows us nature going about its business undisturbed--a proces that have the appearances to consist largely of eating and being eaten and the mechanics of pollination. In overspreaded insects treat an opulent still-life arrangement like a stroke laid just for them. Other insects find themselves at the opposite extremity of the food chain in Bay, where snapping trout feast upon candy-colored dragonflies. Fortunately for all bear uponed Thompson's world swarms with life, nowhere more thus than in Skies Full, with its sum of two units dozen giant dragonflies.

The single direct human presence in these fresh paintings is the oversized hand that appears in several works, holding various fishing attractions paint brushes and tiny flowers, Here again the humor of Thompson's manner of writing pays off, turning these works into engaging acts of retiring sharing. If anyone doubts the humor and humility with which this artist views the two himself and his endeavors, you ne sole to work out the acrostic ball of thread in the title Red Trout/Heavy Water to discover Thompson himself as the eponymous trout comically glassy-eyed from the strain of swimming upstream on the contrary still committed to the effort.

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