Frame, Peter G. Thompson

University of Kansas Professor Emeritus Peter G. Thompson is best known for his vibrant abstract paintings and drawings. However, in 2000, when he became increasingly confined to his home or the hospital, he turned to photography to document his mundane and ever-shrinking surroundings. The first photograph captures the sidelight flanking Thompson’s front door; the second, a corner in his house. A third image shows a row of hooks on a wall in a generic, institutional hospital room. While these images of everyday life are seemingly abstract, they also offer an intimate, personal glimpse into the way aging and illness impact artistic practice.

Peter Thompson’s early works conformed to the abstract tendencies of mid-century modernism exemplified by his Yale art school teachers, Al Held and Jack Tworkow. “I’m a ‘50s kind of guy,” he once remarked with a laugh. A longtime member of the KU faculty who served as chair of the Department of Painting and Sculpture and later Dean of Fine Arts, Thompson helped devise the curriculum that shaped several generations of creative Jayhawks. His own creative work is seen in the stained glass windows and organ frame in the Bales Recital Hall, and in work on view in the lobby of the Lied Center, a major campus addition whose planning and construction he oversaw.
In 1999, upon his retirement from administration, colleagues presented him with a special gift, a digital camera. With that the creative life of the painter and draftsman was transformed. The ‘50s guy became a 21st-century one. Although working with a medium new to him, Thompson quickly showed the persistence of a fine compositional sense and a reverence for abstract design that had distinguished his earlier work. Frame is part of a series of photographs closely focused on commonplace objects found in a typical American household, like this metal picture frame. But, as shown here, Thompson could capture his subjects in such a manner as to make them nearly—or completely—abstract, at least momentarily disorienting the viewer with a radically simple design in sharp black and white. CCE