SANTA FE, NM.- Peyton Wright Gallery will present “Transitions”, an exhibition of new works by Donald Roy Thompson.

The exhibition runs Friday September 2 to Tuesday October 4.

There is an opening reception on Friday, September 2 from 5-7pm.

Donald Roy Thompson was born in 1936, in Fowler, California. He received his B.A. degree from Sacramento State University in 1960. He received his M.A also from Sacramento State University in 1962. His most notable art instructor was Wayne Thiebaud. Among his classmates were Fritz Scholder and Merrill Mahaffey, both successful artists in Santa Fe.

From 1964-2000 Donald was an art instructor at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. Before he settled down to teach, Donald traveled and lived in Mexico City, where he was able to observe closely the murals of Diego Rivera.

Like so many color field painters of his generation, Thompson was influenced by Johannes Itten and Josef Albers, as well as by Matisse and Mondrian. During an impoverished time in his early art career he was unable to afford good quality paint, so instead he used layers of hand dyed cheesecloth for a large installation at the Cabrillo College Gallery. It helped form the basis of the ideas of transparency that he later produced in his acrylic color field paintings of 1971-75.

By 1972 Donald began again to use opaque colors on various sizes of canvas, focusing on the illusion of transparency. By 1974 he began to feel the need for greater physicality and began to employ the use of stretched canvases of a single color bolted together from large to huge (7.5’ X 10’), now in the Oakland Museum.

Thompson settled in Santa Fe in 2013. There he began a current series of work, rekindling an aesthetic from four decades previous and culminating in his Echo series, featured in the Peyton Wright Gallery 2018 exhibition “The Illusive Dimension of Color.”

In 2022, he continues to refine his approach and vision, drawing on a
lifetime of work while still looking forward. In his current work he is touching on the curvilinear geometries he explored in the 1960s and integrating those shapes into recent ideas.

“I am habitually focused on the relationship of colors!” he wrote in July of 2022. “I’ve tried, in my paintings during the recent past, to experiment with various forms of pictorial composition - both symmetrical and asymmetrical.

My current challenge is combining the geometric with curvilinear form in an effort to achieve an integrated synthesis of the two, as they are experienced in hard-edge color painting. “

Thompson has exhibited solo and group shows both nationally and internationally. These include solo shows at Larry Evans/Willis Gallery, Foster Goldstrom, and Galeria Carl Van der Voort in San Francisco, and Ibiza, Spain. He had solo shows at Frederick Spratt Gallery in San Jose, California, as well as Shasta College Gallery, in Redding California and Cabrillo College in Aptos, California. His group shows by Leila Taghinia-Milani, New York City, Basel Art Fair, Switzerland and Second British International Print Biennale, Yorkshire, England. Thompson’s Paintings are found in major collections including The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA.; Seattle First National Bank (Seafirst), Seattle, WA; Crocker Museum, Sacramento, CA, Art Museum of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz, CA.