Deanna Thompson

Deanna Thompson is an American artist whose works consist of homestead paintings from the California desert. She currently resides in Yucca Valley, CA.
Background
Deanna Thompson was born in Oildale, California and graduated from California State University, Bakersfield. She currently lives in Yucca Valley.
Work
Influences and Style
For more than three decades, Deanna Thompson has been influenced the vast landscape of the California desert. Living and working in near total isolation, Thompson authentically explores the modern tension that exists between society and the environment and between the temporary and the permanent. Through her subject matter she addresses issues of memory, time and the forgotten and explores the current transformation of landscape from the inhabited to the abandoned.
She uses as her subject matter deserted homesteads, discarded man-made objects, and cast-off debris as a way to examine time and define space in an otherwise vast expanse of endless sky and ground. There is a shifting level of complexity in her paintings ranging between realism and abstraction that often spill out into her desert landscapes.
In much the same way that Robert Rauschenberg found beauty in the dilapidated and worn, Thompson is drawn to a landscape that shows the marks of human activity. With a contrary sense of beauty and an appreciation of the absurd, Thompson reinterprets and reinvents the romantic view of landscape painting in favor of one that is unsentimental and rooted firmly in the present.
Recent Exhibitions

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See Also

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