Page 53 - Studio International - September 1967

Jon Thompson
P.B. 'But there is no frontier here' . . . 'a frontier is usually between two different
things. And here there is only one thing. The meadow here and the meadow there.'
C. 'You're mistaken' . . . 'They are two different things. Here is where you are and
there is where you want to go.'

This fragment from The Adventures of Peady Bottom is not really about
meadows and frontiers but about apparently unrecognizable points of view;
PB is putting the case for simultaneous recognition, C for episodic experience
involving time in the form of present and future. To wrap both concepts up
together in the same parcel is exactly the kind of game I play when drawing ;
the two attitudes are obviously not incompatible but are often difficult to put
into balance, simultaneity being such a deeply entrenched part of art
consciousness.
The abstract expressionists dealt with an amalgam of these two states; the
permanent state present, and the implied, continuing change; but all
excepting Pollock were too bound by the plane and the perimeter, traditional
statements of the simultaneous in painting. Pollock differed in that he moved
the space forward from the plane, as did Matisse in the late collages; thus
they created a multi-dimensional complex of form existing in a state of 'Free
Fall'.
I have tried, in these recent paintings, to pull the form in front of, and to
push it beyond the plane (giving the paintings both internal and external
scale) to have the forms acting in harmony with, and contrapuntal to the
perimeter; so that I have maximum choice in terms of where in the total space
I choose to locate any one single form; thus I have maximum choice in the way
I choose to view the total complex.
Exhibition at the Rowan Gallery 8-28 September

Above Jon Thompson Goby 1967
copolymer acrylic on canvas, 73 x 144 in.
Left Drawings for Goby 1967
pencil and pastel on graph paper