ISSUE 22

I prefer to leave real history to art historians. Instead I want to talk about painting as a response to what I think of as a very basic human need - that of painting something new into the world; I want to talk about painting as a basic form of human expression.
By now if many of our theoreticians were to be believed, we should all of us have mothballed our paintbrushes and bought digital cameras. According to them, to paraphrase Monty Python, painting is already a dead practice, deceased, an ‘ex’-practice, and yet it seems that cadaver refuses to yield up its spirit. Despite all their funeral words, painting continues to enthral us, and tonight I want to ask ‘why’, and hopefully make some progress towards providing an answer.

Jon Thompson (1936-2016)
’Painting and Creative Imagination: The Collected Writings of Jon Thompson’