Landscapes That Find Beauty in the Broken Places

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Emily Thompson employs an emphatic visual shorthand to document well-loved places in a changing landscape.

By Judith Fairly

Growing up in New York City, Emily Thompson became familiar with the urban landscape as she rode the elevated train to school from Queens or walked to work in Manhattan or passed through New Jersey en route to the beach. She never grew tired of the streets and architecture, of the utility lines and signs and the scaffolding that held them up — the armatures and articulated spaces of industrialized civilization.

Since childhood, Thompson has endeavored to recapture the visual experience those urban vistas aroused in her. “As a kid I liked to draw city scenes in pen and ink,” she says. “I would fill sketchbooks with these little scenes of buildings, TV antennas and garbage cans.”

Art Came First

Thompson attended the acclaimed High School of Art and Design (a diverse roster of alumni include the singer/painter Tony Bennett, minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse, fashion designers Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Denys Cowan, media prankster Joey Skaggs, Caldecott-winning illustrator Leo Dillon, writer/director Amy Heckerling and actor/playwright Harvey Fierstein).

She then received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of Visual Arts, where she studied advertising. After graduation, Thompson was an art director at Bloomingdale’s for a decade and then a graphic designer for the marketing department at Playboy Enterprises. Editorial illustration was in its heyday during the 1990s, and Thompson also did a lot of illustration work for a variety of publications, greeting cards, and other products. Today, she focuses mainly on graphic design. “But art,” she says, “came first.”

“I have been an artist my whole life,” says Thompson. “I was lucky to come from parents who supported the arts and exposed me to culture. My mother is an artist and always took me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I would see her painting and knew that I wanted to do that, too.”

Thompson had a traditional art education that included essential skills such as life drawing. But building a painting in stages and layers over a period of days or weeks or even longer is incompatible for an artist with a restless disposition such as hers. While she’s working on one painting, Thompson is already thinking about the next one. “It took me a long time to be able to paint what I see, and that’s probably why I pursued abstract painting,” she says. “I’m more of a memory painter and always had a hard time working from photos and from life.”

A Style Evolution

Over time, Thompson’s fine-art work has evolved. “I’ve painted in all fine art media,” she says. “Years ago, I was painting buildings and signage in watercolor but was just not coming up with a style that I found pleasing. I got interested in abstract painting and really pursued that. I wasn’t going for concept but more for mood, texture, color, and how the paint was applied to the surface.

“This style slowly transformed from a landscape-y feel to a more urban feel. I don’t even know how it happened that I started doing the work I’m currently doing. This work is very personal to me because it captures my love of roadside architecture, urban scenes, signage, and type while still keeping an abstract approach to how I apply paint and use texture. I don’t want to say that my ‘style’ has changed so much as the subject matter has changed.”

The Iron Triangle

Her first series of paintings in this style was inspired by a cluster of auto-repair shops and salvage yards at Willets Point in an area of Queens near the old Shea Stadium known as the “Iron Triangle.” (This neighborhood was also the site of the futuristic 1939 and 1964–65 World’s Fairs.) The scrap heaps and shambolic body shops erected on the ashes of a municipal dump and gridded by unpaved, potholed roads would be regarded by many as a blot on the landscape. But Thompson was riveted by the view from the No. 7 train. “I am always observing my surroundings,” she says.

“I can appreciate the beauty of an open field with dried grasses or cornstalks reaching for the open sky. But I also find beauty in unexpected scenes like an old scrap-metal yard or an abandoned building. I love anything that is distressed, broken down, and rusty. I look for texture, shapes and colors.”

Thompson’s work evokes a sense of nostalgia for landmarks that inhabit a cherished place in our collective memory. Some have withstood the ravages of time and demands of human progress; many others have fallen victim to development and desuetude. This transformation of the landscape is manifest in the section of Queens that first inspired this series. The same locality has, within a human lifespan, hosted a World’s Fair electrified by the dawning of the Space Age and apportioned space for an industry devoted to the repair, dismemberment and final resting place for the more prosaic products of the automobile age.

Graphic Influences

The gritty, weather-beaten but stalwart character of her subject matter is reflected in Thompson’s painting method and strong linear structure. She’s not aiming for a realistic, rendered style. “I wouldn’t call myself a ‘representational’ painter,” she says. “I’m still using the same style as I did with my abstract work, but the subjects are more representational.”

The random marks and smudges and stray flecks of color allude to the detritus and rust and peeling paint and discarded bits of paper so familiar to a city dweller, while faint lines that crisscross in the background hint at Thompson’s graphic design background. In another nod to the language of the graphic arts, she sometimes embosses words or numbers in the wet paint with a vintage rubber printer’s stamp (see The County above) to add direction or narrative to the image and uses stylized lines to represent trees.

Thompson edits her photographs to isolate the portion of the landscape that she finds most beautiful. “I like a close, interesting crop, and I try to incorporate a lot of sky or empty space around my subject,” she says. “I tend to stay away from subjects that have trees and more of the landscape behind them. When I’m doing lettering and something that has a close crop or perspective, I need to get a good drawing down before I can start painting.”

A Hint of Gold

Rather than applying gesso to prime her surface, Thompson puts down a layer of acrylic paint in a metallic gold color on which she does a pencil sketch. “I like to have hints of the gold show through by scraping into the oil paint,” she says. “I paint in sections rather than blocking in areas. Once I get a section painted, I go back with a palette knife to create the texture. In order to achieve the effect I’m seeking, I work wet-on-wet so I’m able to drag, scrape, scratch, and smudge the paint. Sometimes I can get a painting to the point where I can stop and continue the next day but, for the most part, I like to try to finish in one session. These paintings take anywhere from six to 12 hours to complete.”

Urban Appeal

Though Thompson and her husband, artist George Thompson, left New York City for bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania 17 years ago, her fondness for the manufactured components of the city hasn’t waned.

“I have an appreciation for all genres, but what excites me the most is the industrial landscape and urban paintings, both representational and abstract. I love signage, type, buildings, water towers, railroad tracks, over- passes, telephone poles and wires, scaffolding, gratings, and graffiti. These are what really appeal to me. I also have a love for roadside architecture, especially when it feels nostalgic: metal diners, signs, bowling alleys, old gas stations.”

One perk of living in the country, however, is room for a working space on the third floor of the Thompsons’ farmhouse. “Another reason I think my work has evolved is due to my husband. Since we share a studio I’m constantly watching what he does. He’s a great painter and he explains his methods in ways that make sense to me. But I think it took me a while to see that. He really has helped my work improve.”

The Materials She Uses

• Oils: Gamblin (primarily), Winsor & Newton and Utrecht: titanium white, warm white, cool white, unbleached titanium or titanium buff, ivory black, Payne’s gray, perylene black, yellow ochre, burnt umber, greenish umber, napthol red light, cadmium red light, Indian red or burnt sienna, cerulean blue
• Gamblin makes a great line of grays: Portland gray light, medium and deep; Portland cool gray, Portland warm gray, torrit gray
• I rarely use greens and yellows, but if I do: brilliant green, yellow green, viridian, cadmium yellow, chrome yellow
• Brushes: I like the shortest, flattest, and firmest brushes I can find: Winsor & Newton Monarch short brights; Utrecht Tuscan Series brights, Winsor & Newton Galeria; Manet French classic short brights. For backgrounds I like to use bristle brushes and then go back in with palette knives. The bristle brushes are usually from Utrecht.
• Palette knives: I love all palette knives but do have some specific shaped ones that I use all the time (see page 42).
• Surfaces: Da Vinci Pro Panels; medium-density fiberboard panels or ready-made cradled panels. (Ampersand, Blick, etc.); I like using cradled panels because I can simply paint the sides black and wire the back, and the piece is ready to hang. It also gives me the option to use a floater frame. I usually choose something simple like a black floater.
• Mediums: Gamsol and cold wax medium by Gamblin: though cold wax is a medium that you can mix with your oil paints, it can also be used as a final varnish. When the painting is dry I apply the cold wax medium, which usually dries well enough in 24 to 48 hours and then I can buff it into a nice satiny finish. It will remain slightly sticky for a while. I keep buffing it and eventually it will dry hard.

Demo: Starting Small

By Emily Thompson

I’ve been wanting to paint this old five & dime store (it’s still in business) for a while but for some reason it wasn’t happening. I finally just worked with a straight-on photo. Aside from the lettering being so fun to do, I also love doing store windows, though it’s definitely a challenge because painting glass, reflections and the things that are in windows is really hard … for me anyway. And I don’t want it to look realistic.

Plan: One Section at a Time

I treat each area as if it were a little abstract painting, so when all the pieces come together, the illusion is that there are lots of stuff in those windows without there actually being stuff!

1. The Panel

I start with a 12×12 unprimed cradled birch panel and a wide, flat brush.

2. Priming the Surface

I use a metallic acrylic, usually gold, instead of the traditional gesso, to prime my surface. I like to apply the paint in different directions with broad, random brushstrokes, which give me a textured surface to work on.

3. Letting It Dry

Here you see the primed panel that’s dry and ready to go. I don’t mind that the paint went on in an uneven way or shows brushstrokes. Once I paint on top, no one will see that, but the gold gives me a nice effect as it will come through in the areas where I use a scumbling effect and also in the spots that I scrape into.

4. Pencil Sketch

After I edit my photos and choose my composition, I print out my final choice to use as reference. Then I do a pencil sketch onto the primed panel. Because I’m dealing with lettering and architecture, I try to get an accurate drawing, though the drawing will basically be just a guide, as I don’t want to render everything perfectly once I start to paint. I want things to be slightly off.

5. Palette Knives

I use a variety of sizes; I will need all of these for this one painting!

6. Painting in Sections

In this case I started with the signage and lettering on the building.

7. & 8. Piece By Piece

Progress is incremental, as opposed to the overall process of blocking in.

9. Finished Piece

Sine’s 5 & 10 (oil on panel, 12×12)

10. Afterword: My Paints

Gamblin or Winsor & Newton and Utrecht oils; I will use the Gamblin Cold Wax Medium as a varnish; when that dries I can buff the surface so that it will have a satiny finish.

Learn more about Emily Thompson and see more of her work at ethompsonstudio.com.

Judith Fairly writes about the visual arts and is a frequent contributor to The Artist’s Magazine.

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