Online Paintings

The career of Bob Thompson has been likened to a meteor for his brilliant but brief life in fine art reproductions, which ended in 1966.1 A man of boundless energy and joie de vivre, but little moderation, Thompson died in Rome at age twenty-nine, worn down by a life of hard living and excess.

Thompson, a Kentucky native, received his formal oil painting, fine art gallery training at the University of Louisville from 1957 to 1959. There he was exposed to European influences from émigré teachers such as Ulfert Wilke, a German Oil painting artist who was also versed in the New York School styles of abstract expressionism. Traces of these early impressions appear repeatedly in his work. Thompson started out as an abstract oil painter, but shifted toward figurative expressionism after a visit to Provincetown, in 1958, where he encountered the original oil painterly representations of Jan Müller and Gandy Brodie.

The following year Thompson settled in New York City, where he frequented jazz clubs and cut a stylish figure in the downtown music and fine art gallery scene, befriending the jazz notable Ornette Coleman, and Oi painting artists Red Grooms and Jay Milder. In many respects, his oil paintings, fine art gallery reproductions, oil painting on canvas from that time onward are quotations from traditional works, much like the riffs of his musical contemporaries. With Grooms and Milder, Thompson participated in this country's earliest happenings2 -visual art reproductions/theatrical events analogous to jazz's improvisational performances. In turn, Thompson translated many of the theatrical aspects of his related interests into his oil paintings.

Thompson married in 1960 and together with his wife sailed the following year to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth. The couple made their way from London to Paris, and then Spain, where they settled in Ibiza, surviving for two years on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. In Europe, Thompson continued to translate old master compositions in his personal palette of highly intense, unmodulated color.