Mark Thompson is an award winning landscape painter, the Gilchrist-Fisher prize in 2002 and the Villiers-David award in 2004 are just two from his collection. His majestic, snow-clad wildernesses evoke the remoteness and grandeur of the scenes portrayed.
Born in the dead flat plain of the Fens in East Anglia in 1972, he began as an abstract painter but eventually found that his true preoccupation as a painter was landscapes.
He has travelled extensively and alone to Scandinavia, Finland and Alaska, his purpose as he says ‘to go out into the landscape - being a sponge, soaking it up'.
On returning to his studio, he starts to paint, but his object is not to depict a place rather, as he puts it ‘to find a place'. While travelling he draws, takes photographs and written notes of what he sees. Painting begins in an abstract way, ‘there is' he says ‘a lot of throwing the paint around, and a lot of pouring'.
Through that physical moving of the pigment, he tries to find the place he is looking for. ‘There's always a picture inside your head, an internal landscape that you are trying to find, an equivalent to in the external world.' So the result is, in part, a reconstruction of what he has seen, in part a discovery of the ideal he was searching for.
