Art Thompson, Jr. - Drawings + Paintings

ART THOMPSON, JR.

My interest in this series lies in my heritage. I was born in New Orleans to a Chilean mother and a Scotch/English father who was born in Nicaragua. I'm a walking contradiction genetically made up of colonial opportunists and poor civil servants. I wanted to create a mini-narrative of paintings representing the United States' Foreign Policy in Central America. I used water as a theme not only because it represents life, but also because each Central American country touches either the Atlantic or Pacific ocean and it was originally through the use of our Navy and Marines that we exerted such absolute control over them. From the signing of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and on through our intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980's and beyond the United States has wielded enormous influence over these poor countries using a combination of military and economic might. While it remains questionable whether James Monroe may have merely intended to keep Europe's colonial powers out of our hemisphere, the immediate result was a pseudo-colonization by the U.S.

Using invented scenes, which started out as quick brush and ink sketches, these works explore the various ways our country has maintained its dominance over Central America and much of South America as well. The images themselves portray man-made structures subverting natural bodies of water, sometimes in absurd ways. I ultimately thought of water as an appropriate metaphor to convey my message since access to safe water supplies is the possibly the most essential requirement for developing an autonomy and, thus, is how most developing nations and their communities are kept under control by the powerful.

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