Legendry; Interview with Artist Anthony Thompson

Good afternoon. This is Frank Anthony. Welcome to the legendry. Today is a changed 180 degrees from our last legendary program featuring the systematic and disciplined approach to art of Hannahs Backman. My guest today is anything but systematic and defined about his art as today's program will reveal. Mr. Thompson does not think of art as a rational process. Anthony Thompson is part of a new movement in art and theatre that strives to find a more meaningful way of expression by doing away with the old and traditional ideas. Mr. Thompson's wall paintings are on exhibit at the Hopkins Center in darkness. This weekend. Need Thompson welcome to legendary Vermont Public Radio. And let's

start this afternoon by talking a bit about where you were born and some of your background your early education and that kind of thing. I was born just outside of New York City and Scarsdale New York and went to a regular public school and moved to Connecticut in somewhere and and you know the end of elementary school and went to public high school in Connecticut and then came to Dartmouth. I spent two years at Dartmouth and then transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence Rhode Island and went on to Cornell University and got a master's degree at Cornell. At that time at Dartmouth there just wasn't much Art Paul sample was an artist in residence and I took extra curricular classes in drawing and painting with him. One of the reasons that I didn't stay there for four years here was I found myself being interested in spending more time in my extracurricular activities than in my class work. So after two years I went to the School of Design and that's where I really started

a concentration on art. That's the word. How do you feel about the school design we don't hear too much about it. Well it's. Had a reputation for some time that's been outstanding and as a result of an outstanding reputation you get very good students and it has a painting and sculpture and printmaking and that sort of thing it does have good departments in everything from architecture to industrial design and that's and so forth. There are going through some changes there now and I'm really not closely in touch to know what's what's going on I got a good basic education there. I have you know one doesn't graduate with a complete lack of criticism for one schools but they did a good job I think they're from a recent article in art in America from you know the article I'm referring to you were called the most respected Boston artist. Why was that.

Well I'm not sure it was the most it may have been a most respected Boston artist and of course that would depend on what group of people you were asking about. I lived in Boston a long time and I was very much involved with. Our politics as well as as just making paintings. And I think some of my rich reputation comes from that I was very upset. At a certain point about the artist's position in society and the kind of things where you have an exhibition and everyone pays a fee to come and see the exhibition and everyone is paid except the artist who is the reason for having the exhibition. So I did a lot of work trying to establish a little bit more possibility for an artist to make a living from his or her work. It's hard enough to do and yet we have a kind of built in thing where the artist is considered not a business person and kind of gets exploited a lot of times it's very

unusual to have a written contract with a dealer or a gallery Let's say things like that. And I spent time working on those issues and I think the fact that I continued to paint without selling much and also that I was interested in the artist's plight in the in the community probably can contributed to that. But I would certainly have you know think that needed qualification as being the respect and respect. I think one of a number. What was it like in Boston and what you know was most of your activity involved with there. Well I as I say spent about 11 years or so I taught at Cornell University for a while and then moved to Boston because I wanted to be in a more urban kind of environment. I thought it was healthier for my career as a painter. And so I spent quite a bit of time actually sort of mature to

a certain point during that stay of 11 years or so when I came there I was full of ambition and naive and young and on the outside of the art establishment and by the time I left I felt like I had certainly not economically but in other senses kind of done what could be done and in Boston and I felt like I wanted. Well I guess in frankness I have to take a slap at at Boston. It's one of the most conservative cities in the country. I recently spent some time in North Dakota as an artist in residence in Minnesota and North Dakota. Then your front door right Fargo-Moorhead I was actually teaching it or being an artist in residence at Morehead State University which is right next to Fargo. I found the people out there are more open and accepting of ideas as a kind of smugness in Boston

which I think and then they do have quite a tradition and history and it's a beautiful and wonderful city but there's a kind of smugness which is very hard on contemporary art and one of the big things there was a struggle to get the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to even have a contemporary curator and a program in contemporary art which they do now but it was after the artist formed a union and did all kinds of things to try and. Push that idea. So Boston continues to be a beautiful place and with a lot of tradition. But for the kind of work that I do it just showed my work in galleries there for eight years or nine years and just didn't get anywhere. And it was mostly the good faith of the dealers and that sort of person that kept the working public not because it was successful economically.

Well did you find it even more difficult in that respect when you left Boston for New York. Well yeah but I also found it more rewarding in that there's just more painting and there's more. I find that I'm able at this point to sustain that kind of energy and interest that I did when I first came to came to Boston and there's so much art to see there's so many people involved and in art there there's a lot of. Kind of reinforcement in the psychological sense to your position because you go and see a dance concert with say 12 dancers and you know none of them are making a living from their work and they love dancing and so they they do it. And that just didn't happen in Boston you felt like you were sort of a stranger. If you were just trying to make to make art I often use a parallel feeling like I got back inside the stockade when I got to New York and I was somewhere out there on the frontier being shot and you don't think about that with Boston you think about it more in North Dakota let's say but I felt a lot more comfortable actually in North Dakota because people were more

curious about you were what you were doing. Well I suppose that. A short stay there that's not a very good basis for that judgment. I just felt that people were more willing to see what you were up to to take a good look at it to ask you about it. And the reception was generally not necessarily people falling all over with you. But there wasn't that kind of distance or whatever. What's interesting what is so homie your caller Solarz to I'm just wondering what that means. Soho refers to a district in New York and Soho stands for South of House street and does have a history of moving from place to place where the space moving into neighborhoods that are not much prized but have good spaces in developing those spaces and then the rest of the community moves in and the prices go up and the

artists have to move on. So so how it's now past the point where artists can afford to live there. And even the next district when this kind of cycle which is called Try Baca which stands for the triangle below Canal meaning referring to Canal Street is another these are both commercial areas with large loss spaces they were a lot of fabric warehouses and cutters that sent fabrics over to the garment district to the west and. So that just refers to an area it's become real less chic and I can't afford to live there and I have a tiny little space there but it takes a while for the next place to develop and I wish I knew where it was going to be next. So that's what Soho is and is it true that there's sort of a one central place in our clearing house that you have to get through

to be able to get into a respectable gallery in the New York area. I wish I knew what it was if there was such a place I don't I don't know about that there are a lot of different strategies and different ploys for getting your work shown and seen a lot of it depends on what type of a person you are I mean if you're socially adept and whatever you can do one thing and if you. I'm not you have to do other things there's a kind of an alternative gallery system which has developed in the last few years called alternative spaces which are not commercial galleries but art galleries that are publicly funded from the State Arts Council or the National Endowment and they show work which mostly by people who don't have commercial galleries or who are doing work that's not very saleable and this doesn't have anything to do with its quality but there are painters and sculptors dealing in phenomena and things like noise and smoke and things that you can't pin down

enough to really sell. Anyway the sort of stranger things get shown in those galleries and a lot of artists show their first and it's a chance for it's easier to get people to come and see an exhibition than it is to get them to come to your studio and look at the work. So a lot of people do that. What's your approach to your art. Well I'm not I'm not sure how you mean my own approach to my art. My approach to marketing my Either my career or what do I think about when I go into the studio and start to work and just make it my own. Mostly what you think about what is your own approach to going to your type of artwork. Well. My approach is to try and subvert my rationality somehow. I work in the hope of being able to have the images and

configurations that I make come out of functioning that isn't rational I don't mean irrational or crazy or anything I just mean extra or other than rational other than logical. I don't think it's possible to figure out how to do a painting. I think there are other ways in which our brains work which are not logical and linear and and rational and they're also not verbal and. This is what I'm what I'm trying to get at. Now some of this is not necessarily nonobjective. No no it has nothing to do really with with whether the work has recognizable images or or abstractions. I just mean that you don't figure out. How to make a picture that the picture is generated by other by other means.

Any more than you figure out how to dance or any any other of the of the arts and probably in a sense that says that a scientist doesn't really figure out the real advances to figuring out sort of goes in seeding though the advances into the existing body of knowledge getting them translated back but I don't think I think that these great ideas or creative thinking are based on function other than a rational function. I can get into a whole talk about the right and left hemisphere of the brain and one side being verbal and. Linear and rational on the other side being synthetic and holistic and to really deal with that question. That's what I would do. Painting is both my vocation and my hobby hence both my work and my curiosity and I do it and I also wonder about how come I do it and

how I go about doing it and how when I'm really making good things why is that and all that sort of question and that kind of hobby aspect of it has led me into a real serious investigation of brain function and the parts of our brains that are the creative parts and the parts that have other functions in the way way we think and work. How did your world works develop Tony. My work's develop because I found I was making pictures smaller and smaller in the middle of larger and larger canvases or panels. The image was very. Far from the edges and kept getting farther and farther from the edges of whatever shape I chose to work on. And it occurred to me and I talked about this after the fact because what I'm doing now is analyzing what happened and when it happened it wasn't that I decided this is what I should do. It happened because I found myself having the urge to do it

and and I did these things so after the fact it seemed if you want to get away from having to paint a shape on a rectangle or a square of canvas or paper or whatever that the logical solution was either to do sculpture which doesn't have a format like that or to paint right on the wall. And since I am really a 75 percent painter I think 25 percent sculptor most of my successful things have gone on the wall it's just a way of working on a surface so that the. Marks that you're making and their relationship to each other or their configuration themselves that interest is not diluted by where those marks are in relation to an edge whether you decide to put it in the middle or over in one corner. That's always a factor. Kind of compositional factor. It's when you start out in art school you have to learn to draw the figure and they tell you think about the whole page make the head at the top and the feet at the bottom and you do all kinds of exercises and it's made very clear that

when you make a mark on a piece of paper you're dealing with two elements the mark and the piece of paper. Well I wanted to deal with just the mark undiluted so that all the attention would be paid and what the mark was doing. And so to do that I took away the paper on the canvas and put it right on the wall. Of course the bigger the wall in the farther away the ceiling and the edges are the better. Only saying in America that you're avoiding problems over the optical behavior of color. What does that mean. Well I wish I was better versed in my own press than I am. That's a recent article and I read through it but I'm not sure I know the context that was in. I can speculate about I can tell you what my feelings about color are. Though I think I begin to have some understanding of space. Any understanding of color really completely eludes me.

I worked for a long time without any color or with color they only came from the material that I was working with which I worked with the glue that was a brown color and some white paper the colors would be brown and white I did things with latex and other materials that had different colors. At that point using color or picking a color seemed kind of arbitrary to me. I would just say well use blue today or whatever. Quote a painter I know saying I've often used green because I couldn't get the lid off the blue. I felt that way about color in these pieces now are starting with whatever color. I have a particular interest in or thinking about putting that down or letting it dry and picking another color. And I can do that without concerning myself with any kind of rational color scheme or idea and build up those colors until something happens that I like. So that's my approach to color now. It was you said avoiding

problems of what was it. Problems of optical behavior of color. Well the thing that. The thing about these pieces is that the color becomes stuff it doesn't. It isn't in any way a femoral. It's a thick coat. And then it's another thick coat on top of that until it builds up and it becomes a thing. So in other words it has a physicality. Now I'm not sure what he means about optical behavior of color but in most painting you work on a surface and you put a thin or barely measurable. Certainly not optically measurable layer of color and that color has an ephemeral quality it can float off the surface of the paper or it can reseat into the paper now that you may mean by that what the optical properties of it are. I'm purposely trying to avoid that because I'm trying to get rid of illusion. Another purpose for

using the wall instead of the canvas is that a canvas or a piece of paper has a history of hundreds and hundreds of years of being used for optical tricks to make landscapes which look like you could walk in and back up to the mountains or to make pears with Oyster on them that look good enough and easy enough to eat and so forth. So there's an expectation of illusion when you start dealing with a piece of paper. And I'm interested I did in painting that just sits there that does nothing that does no tricks that is something marvelous in itself without being. Without any strategies or tricks of any kind this that sort of seems to me it seems to be more mysterious to me I mean it's it's the simple existence of things to me is the most mysterious thing in the world and done before.

Oh sure I'm sure it has. One doesn't expect that they'll ever be able to do anything that hasn't been done before you hope to do it your way perhaps or slightly slightly different you find the opposition to it. Well I don't know if opposition. It's pretty hard to have opposition these days. We're so in fact there are a lot of sociologists and people wondering about the Guard and the history of Vanguard has gone on so long that it's very hard now to be avant garde to do anything. I would like to think that that we learned our lesson that so many times we said stuff was awful and it only took a matter of time before we began to love it. I'd like to think that we had learned that lesson but. I think Bernard Shaw said one thing we know from experience is that man doesn't learn from experience.

So I don't I don't know about opposition. I think people indifference is much much worse than opposition. How do you how do you feel about your exhibition that's No.1 at the Hopkins Center here at Dartmouth. Well I just arrived a couple hours ago and walked and I thought it looked pretty good. I was it's always interesting when you don't do an installation yourself because these are different from things that are just home that you have framed and sent and they're hung on the wall these have to be affixed to the wall. And so you wouldn't wonder what they're going to look like when someone else does it. And I thought they were there. I thought they did a good job. What are you working on now Tony back in your studio making a living. Most of the time. Any particular kind of painting. I'm working on the work that that is related to this when I when I get a chance to I sort of.

Do teaching from time to time and other things to make to make a living because I don't do it with my work. But and I also write things about art and work on that so that my hobby my hobby so knowing about it and wondering about it and you know take the form of teaching and and writing and I've been involved with that pretty heavily. But I am working on some pieces that are very much related to these pieces in the in the exhibition here. There's sort of a continuation of that idea there in made a painting are on the wall and they are often combined with pencil marks and chalk marks on the wall as well. Well these pieces that you have are being shown all through November into December and as people view this art that you have at the exhibition How do you feel would you would you say that they'll be looking

at. Examples of similar kinds of things that you'll be doing you know for a while. Or do you think you'll be going into something radically different. Well it won't be radically different it will be different in that the color combinations will be different and I've just been I've just been working at a place called Clay works in New York which is a ceramic studio and I've been a visiting artist there. I hadn't worked in clay before and they supply the materials and technical expertise and so I've been doing things in clay. So in that sense they are different because they are in clay and not in paint in the clay behave differently. But the imagery and the kind of idea and the object ness of them is very much the same. So it's a different material but the same point of view definitely. But Tony I want to thank you very much for our interview today and I hope that you will have great success in

the future. Thank you. You. You are.