We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marjorie Thompson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marjorie below.
Marjorie, appreciate you joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?
It’s a complex question. It is both yes and no for me.
Yes definitely. I held back for so long that I feel I have a lot of work to do to catch up.
Creative people need to create. It’s that simple. By keeping a lid on the creative fire, I believe it leaves a void in what should be a full life. So many people deny themselves creativity. No matter what the outlet is, there should be an outlet of some kind. It doesn’t have to be art. It can be music or cooking or doodling. But holding back is detrimental in my opinion.
In regard to painting, I had set my expectation bar so high that my answer was to not try. I didn’t even collect art, go to art shows or galleries. I left it all behind until about 25 years ago, when I realized how much of a hole in my heart I had made. I opened the door a crack and took a jewelry making class. Then got a little traction and started a fabricated jewelry business. Teeny tiny work and not painting was my way back in to a creative life. I did a little photography. Lots of baby steps along the way, a little more traction and then started painting again in 2010, which was the year my father passed away. Painting felt like the connection to him that I wanted to keep. I took over all the art supplies from his studio and began painting again. It wasn’t an easy step back in, I worked really hard for the next 10 years to get to a point where I felt I was ready to launch. Those 10 years were about a lot of trial and error, emulating, practicing, gaining knowledge, and most importantly, showing up.
As I look back now, I wish I would have started painting again years ago or never walked away in the first place. But in the end, the answer to the question is no. Life has been rich for me and full of many experiences that are cumulative in my art. Without these things, my paintings would not be as deep.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m a fourth-generation artist. My father was a painter, his mother (my grandmother), and her parents (my great grandparents). I am not a product of art school; I was mentored by my father and self-taught from there. I grew up painting and creating art for our family gallery located in the Pacific Northwest of the US. When I went off to college, I dropped art and went on a different path. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be an artist with such large shoes to fill. Art by my great grandparents can be seen in museums. They were trained and famous. I felt I had to be equal. I set a bar for myself that kept me out of art for many years. I was afraid of falling short.
As creatives, holding back the need to create is very hard on us. Stifling the creative fire leads to unfulfillment in our lives. But the good news is that fire burns eternally, and as soon as the flames are fanned, it grows again.
The art I make now, is totally uniquely me. It is not the art of those that came before me. I paint intuitively and without a plan. Although, their lessons are always rolling around the back of my mind, I broke free of the barriers I set for myself and kept going along my own creative path. I love what I do, and I am excited to see where this creative journey leads me.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
“Abstract art is for people who cannot paint” I grew up with this woven into my fabric. It trickled down from the fine painters high in the family tree. As a kid, I wanted to paint horses, they were wonky and imaginary. I remember my Dad sitting me down to teach me to draw a horse. He didn’t want to stifle creativity, yet, he wanted me to understand what it means to paint a horse. I needed to learn the anatomy, muscles and bones, he gave me a beautiful book. I needed to understand how a horse was made in order to render it beautifully. I don’t regret this understanding; it is important to learn these things. Yet, it’s taken me many years to shake this and free up my own expression of what I want to paint. My paintings are not planned, they just emerge. After all the training in thumbnails, planning and sketching – I don’t do it. I still fight with perspective in my work. My eye was trained for it and can see when it’s not right. But yet I want my work to be what it is and not caught up in all the rules. I’m not knocking rules, because many many of them are still important to me for making a painting come together.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Making people happy. I love the idea that something that I have created makes someone else happy. It lights me up to realize that someone else resonates with my work and is willing to take it home and hang it on their wall. I like being the storyteller and beginning a dialog with viewers. The painting provides the opening paragraph and the viewers use their own memories to fill in the rest of the story. I love it when someone else emerges themself into my painting and “gets it“.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.marjoriethompsonart.com
- Instagram: @marjoriethompsonart
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarjorieThompsonArt/