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

In his most recent exhibition, Richard Thompson's signature style, with its broad drawing and overripe color, proves to be more flexible than one might have predicted when this artist first gained notice in the early 1980s. At that time the cartoon elements of his technique fit neatly with the comic narratives he depicted. He placed big round eyes, for example, on slightly bloated bodies that were frequently surrounded by tiny curved lines indicative of excited movement. In those early paintings, 19th-century American pioneers have disconcerting encounters with ringing telephones and circling helicopters. In later Thompson works, young executives loosen their ties, roll up their sleeves and look miserably out of place in the wild.

Thompson is a fisherman, and his current work is set in a landscape of lushly painted mountains, forests and lakes. He's retained many of the cartoonlike elements of his earlier work: insects have huge, pendulous bodies, mountains come to absurdly pointed peaks and colors glow with an unnatural light. But Thompson has removed the jokes from these paintings, replacing, them with a deeper comic vIsIon based on celebration and acceptance. It's surprising how little adjustment of his previous style was necessary to convey this new attitude with conviction and feeling.

There are no longer human beings to feel uncomfortable in Thompson's paintings. Although human presence can still be felt, for the most part the artist shows us nature going about its business undisturbed--a process that seems to consist largely of eating and being eaten and the mechanics of pollination. In Covered, insects treat an opulent still-life arrangement like a buffet laid just for them. Other insects find themselves at the opposite end of the food chain in Bay, where snapping trout feast on candy-colored dragonflies. Fortunately for all concerned, Thompson's world swarms with life, nowhere more so than in Skies Full, with its two dozen giant dragonflies.

The only direct human presence in these new paintings is the oversized hand that appears in several works, holding various fishing lures, paint brushes and tiny flowers, Here again the humor of Thompson's style pays off, turning these works into engaging acts of modest sharing. If anyone doubts the humor and humility with which this artist views both himself and his endeavors, you need only to work out the acrostic clue in the title Red Trout/Heavy Water to discover Thompson himself as the eponymous trout, comically glassy-eyed from the strain of swimming upstream but still committed to the effort.

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