Michael Thompson: Passion Over Reason

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Michael Thompson’s precise yet luminous work is reminiscent of such
Magic Realism school of East Coast painters as Tom Forrestall, Mary
Pratt, and Christopher Pratt, or American realist Andrew Wyatt. Passion
over Reason is the catalogue for a solo exhibition at the
Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in 1994.

In his foreword, Paul Duval traces Thompson’s life and career,
beginning with a “rough-and-tumble childhood” in a working-class
French-Canadian family in east end Montreal. Thompson graduated from
Concordia University’s Fine Arts program, and was encouraged in his
pursuit of naturalism by Duval’s study High Realism in Canada. The
early 19th-century Romantic movement in German painting was a later
influence.

Many of Thompson’s paintings are symbolic reflections of 20th-century
life. The Boys, a large composition of naked young men in a shower
(Thompson chose the McGill University Sports Complex), was inspired by
his visit to Dachau, where, as he puts it, “the victims never knew
whether it would be cleansing water or poison gas that would pour from
the shower heads.” Priestess, a powerful painting of a black-cloaked
woman in an empty church, suggests a woman living by choice outside the
normal bounds of society. Thompson (b. 1954) was brought up within
Catholicism but left the Church as a young adult.

Subjects include streetscapes of old Montreal, and still life, but his
typical focus is the human face and figure. These are powerful paintings
that may haunt the viewer, paintings that reflect the problems and
strengths of our times.