Kerry R. Thompson, "White Nautilus"
oil on canvas, 24" x 30," 2016
Kerry R. Thompson was born in 1986 in San Diego California, graduating Magna Cum-Laude from San Francisco State University with a Bachelors degree in art in 2009 and later from the New York Academy of Art with a Masters degree in Painting in 2014.
Kerry has exhibited work in his first solo show, “K.R. Thompson: A New Mythos” at the Noel-Baza Gallery in San Diego, CA (2012), as well as numerous shows affiliated with the New York Academy of Art. While there, Kerry was awarded the First Year Scholarship and the Larry Creel Scholarship, and was one of 6 students to be shortlisted for the Third Year Fellowship. In addition, Kerry has participated in numerous artist residencies overseas and locally, including the Terra Foundation for American Art-Europe in Giverny, France, the Hudson River School Painting Residency at Clermont and Olana, NY, and the Audubon Bingham Cottage Residency on Hog Island, ME.
Kerry’s work is both a celebratory and critical exploration of the delicate and highly complex natural biological systems of the world and the artificial human relationship to those systems. The work not only investigates the intricate interrelatedness of the inhabitants of these various world-wide biomes, as well as the formation of these systems through the naturally selective forces of evolution, but also the human role as an orchestral force acting on these systems from the outside, not within.
In the two still-life paintings in "Bounding Main," Kerry worked from life on a pair of nautilus shells, focusing on a nuance of texture and patterning, as well as the chromatic, opalescent quality of the shells themselves. Nautiloids have gone unchanged for about 500 million years, representing an optimal phenotypical design that has been unaltered by the forces of natural selection. Their form is, in a sense, timeless, organisms that have lived in the oceans of the world for hundreds of millions of years and are likely to continue to do so for hundreds more, if human activity doesn't interfere first.
Kerry R. Thompson, "White Nautilus"
oil on canvas, 24" x 30," 2016
