thompson

Good communication requires kinetic creativity: many layers of light, color, texture, balance, nuance, and surprise. Pattern and repetition, rhythm and interruption are a big part of what make up our lives. Geometry bridges the inner and outer worlds, adding structure and sense, both ancient and contemporary.

The pulse of color and the play of light and texture are constant sources of stimulation for Marina. Color creates light, light creates form. Her paintings explore depth, energy and movement with illusions of volume, space, light, and time.

Thompson is a mixed media artist, born in 1952 in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her father was an architect and partner of Walter Gropius. Drawing on the Bauhaus-influenced world from her childhood, her art is graphically strong, informed by her years in textile design and illustration. The work is colorful, rhythmic, layered. It often speaks of sounds, both local and cosmic, while her visual elements are both macroscopic and microscopic.

She enjoys finding expression within the parameters, challenges, and always expanding possibilities of computer software. Not accepting the limits of existing tools and applications, she redesigns them to fulfill her design ideas. She experiments broadly with printing materials and techniques as well as unusual uses of mixed media. She often prints the base layers of her work with a printer on a range of papers, from heavyweight cotton to very lightweight Japanese papers. The papers are saturated with beeswax, often collaged, then painted on, front and back, with layers of paints – oil paint, gouache, flashe, encaustic or cold wax. Waxed and translucent kozo papers are layered to create greater color depth. Great care is taken to make sure all the materials used are archival. She seldom works in series, as her concept development is often fully formed on the computer before starting to work with paper, wax, or paint.

Marina studied industrial design at The Rhode Island School of Design, illustration at The Art Institute of Boston, and weaving from Mexican Indians in Uruapan, Mexico. She loves Persian miniature painting for its flattened, multi-layered, aerial perspectives and inspiring color palette. Other influences include Howard Hodgkin, Paul Klee, Josef and Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Calder, Cy Twomby, and Brice Marden.