'In his too-brief career, Bob Thompson synthesized influences from all over the map and across mediums and genres, while continually adding his own ingredients.' | Dmitry Samarov
, and a half dozen other jazz luminaries coexisting in a pastoral landscape. Some figures are silhouettes, while others are rendered with distinct features. How the painter balanced so many disparate elements into a coherent whole eludes easy description.
In his too-brief career, Bob Thompson synthesized influences from all over the map and across mediums and genres, while continually adding his own ingredients. He is one of those shooting-star-type talents, taken away much too soon. With this dazzling retrospective, organized by the Colby College Museum of Art, he’ll be introduced to a new audience who may be in his debt without even knowing it, and reintroduced to longtime fans, who’ve been singing his praises all the decades he’s been gone.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937, Thompson was exposed to art and music at an early age and went on to study painting under Ulfert Wilke and other exiled German expressionists at the University of Louisville in the late 1950s. Spending time in the art community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, he quickly made connections with both painters and musicians working out experimental forms in the wake of abstract expressionism, developing his own voice while paying tribute to his forebears.
The kind of rumination that standing before a Thompson canvas encourages is very much the headspace that listening to jazz can inspire. That’s no accident: aside from old European painting, jazz was Thompson’s jumping-off point, as well as the pot he boiled in. Archival photos in the exhibition show his canvases gracing New York music clubs as the appreciation was often reciprocal.
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