Richard's Landscape

“Thirteen years ago I made two cross country trips, driving journeys to our farm in Oregon to attend to my father’s final days, and to decide what do to with the home he was leaving behind.

I drove alone through the vast midwestern rural landscape, and it seemed that I was driving on a vast table top with the distant horizon the far, far edge of a great still life. I saw clusters of farm buildings looking all the world like careful set ups on a giant table. The field patterns, big sky clouds, and the far horizon all served as compositional elements. When I returned to my New York studio I began a series of paintings based on this visual experience.

There is a direct line between those paintings inspired by those long, lonely cross country drives and the newest work completed this year, now in my family's old homestead. The rural, Oregon landscape that is just outside my current studio with my neighbors small farms, with the big cloud formations that roll across the Willamette Valley, and the blue Cascade mountains in the distance continues to be a source of content into my creative future.”

—Richard Thompson, 2018

Richard's obituary can be found here.