Art Thompson, Jr. - Drawings + Paintings

ART THOMPSON, JR.

These paintings were inspired by an impromptu visit I made to a Nazi concentration camp while traveling in Austria. I say "impromptu" because it was not a scheduled stop in the day's planned activities. Nevertheless, I went along with the group and was soon engulfed by hoards of Austrian school children wandering through gravel paths wearing different colored badges identifying their schools (ironic?) and expressions of either exhaustion or exasperation—I could not tell which. After my sixth or seventh crematorium I began to develop the same expression the children wore and had to escape to the book store/gift shop to clear my head. An interesting item I found for sale was a book containing photographs taken by German SS guards that documented some of the horrid things being done inside the camp. I was stunned to learn how meticulously the entire process had been documented, recorded and filed away. It was as if they were doing any other type of work. Only these were people being processed. Then the obvious struck me: the Nazi's were people too! Humans even! Humans processing humans. And yet this was nothing new. We'd been doing this sort of thing to each other for centuries. Only, this time every detail was being photographed and cataloged. And here they were, reprinted, bound and available for only 5 marks.

My intention with these paintings was to decipher those sterile, bureaucratic documents and discover any instances when the camera lied and showed me any human moments that might exist among the atrocities. Many of these were mere fragments of larger shots, some no larger than a centimeter square. But they were there.

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