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from the Vineyard Gazette, July 27, 2004 Eagerly, Aiming for a Career in Art By RACHEL NAVA ROHR Oil painter Adam Thompson does not produce the usual market pleasers, but visitors and Islanders have still bought his work every year since he was 17. Now 22, Mr. Thompson is back to his summer routine of painting, an activity he did not have much time for while pursuing an art history degree at Yale University. He is originally from Maine, but Mr. Thompson's summers have always belonged to the Vineyard, and so have the images he paints. As his annual show at the Dragonfly Gallery — through this weekend — demonstrates, Mr. Thompson's work continues to evolve. "I was interested in doing something a little strange on the idea of Island art," said Mr. Thompson. "[I tried] doing something to these images to somehow destabilize my connection to them." Though it sounds like an abstraction only the artist himself would construe from the collection of paintings that resulted, this "destabilized connection" is apparent. The "something strange" was an experiment with color. Mr. Thompson painted each canvas from a photographic negative he took on the Vineyard. With precise images but surreal colors, the familiar scenes he paints are rendered foreign — until the image is put into a computer program that can invert the colors. Then, the often well-known scene is instantly revealed. "I have ideas about it, photographing people with the paintings," said Mr. Thompson, holding out a fan of large photographs. Each one is a negative color image and somewhere in the photo is one of his paintings. The people or the landscapes in the pictures are surreal, their colors unnatural, and their shadows highlights, so they are glowing. But the painting stands out as the most stable element - perfectly realistic. Dragonfly Gallery's owner Holly Alaimo beams when she talks about Mr. Thompson. She discovered Mr. Thompson's work while judging the All-Island Art Show five years ago. "He was 17," she said. "But he looked younger, and I was shocked." She approached Mr. Thompson in his backwards baseball cap and asked him to show her more work. He didn't have more, so he made more and brought it to her gallery. That summer, Mr. Thompson's paintings hung on Dragonfly's walls. "We sold them right away," said Ms. Alaimo. "Every year since, we've had a show." This week's exhibition also includes paintings by Boston artist Michelle Dangelo; Ms. Alaimo wanted to show their work together after they were both featured in Cape Cod Arts magazine. Mr. Thompson does not take his talent or his luck for granted, and credits Ms. Alaimo for encouraging him. As much as he enjoyed his past summer jobs at Hilliard's Candy ("my best job ever"), Fishbones and 67 Circuit ("I bussed -- I never made it to wait staff"), and even his current job at the Field Gallery, his eagerness to make painting a career is transparent. He plans to move to Brooklyn this fall with his girlfriend, a writer who also just graduated from Yale. Mr. Thompson hopes his Ivy League degree will help him find a day job to pay the bills while establishing himself as an artist in New York, but that wasn't his motivation in pursuing liberal arts over art school. "I just had other stronger academic interests," he said. "I don't know if I came out of it with enough career capital, but... whatever." In hindsight, Mr. Thompson laments not taking more studio art classes and not networking more, but he says that overall art history not only satisfied his interests, it shaped his art and his ambitions. "I feel like what it's helped me do is focus on my strengths," he explained. "At this point in history, art has to be more than just self-expressive." Though the couple is not sure whether they will stay in the city beyond their year lease, Mr. Thompson knows he will always come back to the house on the Camp Ground his grandfather bought half a century ago. "Since I have been coming here longer than I lived in Maine, I feel like this is my home," he said. "This is a great place for private pursuits." In the meantime, while he is making a career for himself in New York, his work will still hang on the Dragonfly Gallery walls. |