The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 14.4
APT TOTEMS: Relics and Reverence in the Art of Andrew Thompson
Words: Dave Gargill Artwork: Andrew Thompson 2023-06-16 10:39:47
Meditations on Ballyhoo, 2022
Acrylic on panel
18 x 24 inches
Andrew Thompson has always straddled worlds, been caught between town and country, the anachronistic and the au courant. This dichotomy explains his work to a considerable degree. For someone who has known him for nearly 30 years, his recent renderings of rainbow trout and a great blue heron in acrylic and gold leaf on a pair of Jordan 1s seem apt totems, revealing his influences and elements of his biography.
As he came of age in the 1980s, Thompson’s family split time between Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood and a rustic camp in Silver Bay, which has stood along the northwestern extent of the Adirondacks’ Lake George for generations. The city’s frenetic pace taught Thompson to be observant, and the audacity of street art served to encourage his creative impulses. Time spent upstate offered a valuable contrast, as the setting exposed Thompson to a different visual language and its slower rhythms engendered exploration in order to maintain the level of stimulus the city provided. Hiking in the Adirondack woodlands, plying the waters of Van Buren Bay in the wooden Sunfish his grandfather built, or staring through the still surface of the lake from the docks of the Oneita Boat Club, Thompson’s fascination with the wilderness took root.
Because the camp wasn’t winterized, country weekends from Thanksgiving to early spring were spent at his grandmother Carol Thompson’s colonial-era farmhouse in Pennsylvania, where the longtime editor of Current History hosted a coterie of luminaries. (She presided over the editorial side of the nation’s oldest international affairs journal from 1955-1991, and, according to family lore, Peter Benchely finished Jaws in her barn.) “The Bucks County of my youth wasn’t fancy at all,” says Thompson. “My grandmother’s house was like a time capsule, packed with period furniture and folk art. It radiated those aesthetics. So, it’s no mystery why my work reflects an indebtedness to those traditions.”
Despite ample opportunity for angling there and in the Adirondacks, Thompson pulled his first fish from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake; his second, a flounder, was plucked out of Jamaica Bay around the same time from the Canarsie Pier. It wasn’t until Thompson had graduated from the Brooklyn Friends School (the same school that produced artist Ogden Pleissner) and moved on to college that he picked up a fly rod.
“My buddy John had a place in Vermont,” Thompson recalls. “I’d visit him there in the summers, and we’d ‘fish’ the Winooski. I’m not sure whether to call those first trips debacles or adventures—maybe misadventures is the right word. I don’t think I ever caught anything, but I sure enjoyed standing in the river.”
At Kenyon College—a bucolic hilltop village more evocative of New England than the endless central Ohio cornfields that surround it—Thompson majored in Studio Art, and his work (mostly watercolor on paper, with some woodworking and sculpture mixed in) was primarily representational. Upon graduating, Thompson took a job at Manhattan’s Owen Gallery, where he soon ascended to the role of Director.
As a gallerist, Thompson became a recognized authority on the work of Thomas Hart Benton. For him, Benton’s oeuvre, classified as “regionalism,” tapped into the marrow and mythology of the American experience in much the same way as the folk art that pervaded his grandmother’s farmhouse. Some days, strolling through the gallery’s basement trove of old frames seemed to bend time, transporting him back to his grandfather’s wood shop on that same property, where he’d spent so many hours sanding, tinkering, staining. In that cultural moment, postmortems for the printed word were proliferating in digital spaces, and Thompson’s response was to take up bookbinding, reaffirming a commitment to the material, to the tactile, just as the zeitgeist was heading for the ether. When the art market followed the global markets into the Great Recession of 2008, Thompson returned to the studio.
In the intervening years, flyfishing had assumed a more prominent place in his life. His friend Nat Cooper, a former coworker of Thompson’s at the Silver Bay YMCA, got him started. Oftentimes, Thompson would meet his buddy Owen Dolan—an avid flyfisherman and bartender at his local Brooklyn watering hole—at 4 a.m. on Saturday morning, after last call, to drive up to the Delaware or the Beaverkill and spend the day standing in the river, only stopping to set up camp for the night or drive back to the city. “I learned most of what I would call traditional flyfishing on those rivers,” recalls Thompson.
The centuries-old Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, carriage house that Thompson uses as a studio is a vital blend of chaos and ingenuity. The eclectic inventory complicates, rather than simplifies, attempts to classify his work with any unanimity. There are triptychs of wood ducks painted on paddles; skis emblazoned with giant squid; diagnostic renderings of mayflies—March brown, Green Drake and Isonychia—in pale gold leaf; elegantly wrought handbound books; a shimmering school of greenies evading a wahoo in the pitch-black depths.
“I’ve thought a lot about whether I’m an angling artist, a flyfishing artist, or a wildlife artist,” confides Thompson. “Ultimately, I’m just an artist touching on those traditions while simultaneously honoring other influences. When it’s all said and done, I want to create objects or relics, depicting my various subjects in ways that underscore their intrinsic sacred quality. The gold leaf with its religious connotations, the triptych arrangement and its intimation of an altar—these are subconscious ways of expressing reverence for these natural forms, and for the beauty that’s out there in the solitary reaches, or barely glimpsed because it’s beneath the surface.”
While Thompson may be an artist first and angler second, watching him work—laboring intently and adroitly through the patient, painstaking processes required to capture his vision—his choice of subject seems anything but accidental.
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