MK Thomson uses the observed body as a site for exploring the emotional and symbolic possibilities of colour. Saturated reds, pinks, greens and blues interrupt the naturalism of flesh, allowing painted hands, forearms and feet to suggest blood, heat, touch, labour, contamination or bodily intensity without resolving into one meaning. Because the rest of the figure remains closely observed, these chromatic interventions carry an ambiguous psychological charge. Pigment sits on the body while the body is translated back into pigment. By painting the body before painting the canvas, Thomson turns pigment into both subject and material, folding the act of painting back into the figure itself.
Artist statement
I am a figurative oil painter from Ullapool, in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland. My practice is an ongoing study into the contrast between the non-permanence of existence, the finite nature of physical being, and the timeless accessibility of the body as a visual language. I am concurrently engaged with the enduring significance of oil painting as a tradition that, in contemporary contexts, is characterised by a persistent negotiation of continuity and rupture, such as in paintings by Justin Mortimer and Gerhard Richter. My practice is driven by process, with the tangibility and materiality of oil paint acting as a catalyst for how I respond to, and rearticulate, the human body. This practically driven approach provides a structure of actuality that is saturated by my philosophical studies, primary amongst my influences is Giorgio Agamben’s notion that to be contemporary is to be disconnected from the conditions of one’s time. Subsequently, the non-narrative bodies in my paintings reflect the atemporal and the untimely.
My current practice is an open-ended enquiry into the parallel conditions of contemporary being and contemporary painting; I believe that to engage in either is to walk a shifting landscape of the grounded and the ambiguous. The monumental figures I paint reflect a version of the body that oscillates between solidity, eternity, and the unknowable precarity of now. Ultimately, beyond the fact that they reflect the human, these paintings exist in realms of uncertainty, suggesting that perhaps, beyond the physical truth of existence, life is uncertain.
