Low Down Articles
Artist Profiles - Jim Thomson
Article 66 of 73
From the book Artists of the Gatineau Hill by Catherine Joyce. This article first appeared in the "Artist Profiles" column in the December 21, 2005 issue of the The Low Down to Hull and Back News.
Reprinted with permission. Search complete list of Low Down Articles.
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The Art of the Familiar
There comes a time in the life of an artist when one arrives at a certain place that is familiar, a place of quiet depth and trust where the need to constantly reinvent disappears. Things just are, both within and without.
Jim Thomson has come to this place. After 30 years of experience as a ceramic artist, he has learned to let go. "You spend all this time figuring things out. Gradually a freedom comes. You trust in the raw material. You recognize the bigger picture - you're part of it. Now you respond to your place, to where you are, and you find the language to express it."
Essentially self-taught, Jim remembers key figures who inspired him to see: his mother, who gave him chalk and permission to draw on the walls as a child; Betty Brydon, his art teacher at Hopewell School, who challenged him to self-expression; and Reva Dolgoy at Glebe, who made him aware of the materiality of stuff and how space surround things.
Then there was that moment in 1972 - Jim was nineteen, taking one year in the Vocational Art program at the High School of Commerce when he opened his first bag of clay. "I smelt this moist, mouldy, garden-earthy smell. Ti me and space merged. There was no going back. I always knew I would become an artist, but up until then I expected to become a painter. Clay took me over completely. It chose me."
At the Vancouver School of Art, where he majored in painting, he drew pots, circles, and volumes, until his teachers said, "Just go to the Ceramic Studio, Thomson!"
"I realized at Art School that I was going to have to answer to ideas other than my own. In the clay studio, that pressure wasn't there because Art theory makes Art 'about something'. Working in clay, that pressure wasn't there - initially no one knew much about it, there were no imprints. Ans I felt free to express myself, to teach myself.
"Later, after I had mastered functional ceramics - trying to make a good mug or a pitcher that poured - I began to hang art issues onto ceramic shapes, experimenting with formal elements that removed it from function. But eventually formalism brings you to an impasse. It's not 'about'; it just 'is'.
Exploring notions of beauty, where the shadow of ugliness, illness and death subverted each piece, Jim went on a journey into his own head, producing wild and eclectic work that soon garnered him a national and international reputation. His annual Open House, now into its 24th year, moved from the Ottawa Market area to East Aldfield in 2000 - to Lolaland, where he now teaches ceramics at his school in Lolaland.
Recently Jim has been experimenting with the primary shape of the funnel, its simplicity, its beauty, creating what he calls "Familiars" - where function and mystery meet. It is not what you think it is, or it's more: an entry point, an architectural, time-spaced moment/object that is both real and and an abstraction. I am playing with how we can create our perception of reality."
Jim realizes that it is through the work that you come to understand something about yourself and about the experience of making Art. "I haven't been taught but I've learned. At times I actually think that I momentarily understand the physics of the universe. The 'Other' is out there and after years of devotion, the 'Other' will reveal itself. It always does. It will become a 'Familiar'". And you will be at home to receive it."