Thomas Compton
Thomas Compton is a contemporary artist whose work bridges analogue and digital techniques to craft imagery that feels both modern and timeless. Through meticulous silkscreen printing and experimental layering, his pieces blend personal history, mythology, and storytelling, questioning the reliability of memory and the evolution of narratives over time. Influenced by folk customs, the Arts & Crafts movement, and artists like Paul Nash and Dora Carrington, Compton’s work explores the interplay between intimate personal mythologies and broader cultural archetypes. Recurring motifs, such as the wooden horse, serve as symbols of familial memory and myth, inviting viewers to reflect on the fluidity of time, narrative, and identity.
Your work often combines digital and analogue processes in ways that feel both modern and timeless. Could you walk us through your image-making process for the prints featured in "Under the Laurels," and how it relates to this blend of methods?
Thomas - That’s quite the compliment, thank you! The intention for a project determines many of the process based choices made during image-creation. For this series of prints, I alternated between functional and more freeform approaches to making. Drafting work by hand, scanning and manipulating these alongside haptic digital textures within evolving compositional frameworks sets precedent for the linear sense of narrative necessitated by the graphic novel. This more structured approach initially positions my medium of choice, silkscreen, as a functional output, but printed work I’ve found, thrives within looser constraints and a wilfulness to let the process enact its own agency away from one’s own act of implicit creation.‘Turin Spring Dance’ borrows layers from different artworks in a manner that generates compositional interest beyond my initial capacity to have crafted its exacting effect. A cyclical quality in reading the imagery suspends the initially linear narrative and opens broader possibilities of perception.
The narrative behind "The De Chirico Horse" is both deeply personal and semi-fictional, weaving in family history with a sense of myth. How did you balance fact and fiction in creating these pieces, and what draws you to stories that blur the lines between the two?
Thomas - I think the resonance of a story like this to people is in its recounting. We, who have close family and/or friends have all more than likely heard anecdotal word of mouth stories that just naturally filter down. These stories morph with their retelling and it opens up epistemological and metaphysical questions around the nature of truth. Balancing fact and fiction, although a useful narrative mechanism doesn’t necessarily capture the aura of a story, which I find a far more engaging pursuit.
Thomas Compton, Turin Spring Dance, Screen Print.
Can you talk a little about your studio and your working process?
Thomas - A piece of kit essential to my practice is the silkscreen printing bench. It takes up a lot of room in the studio, emblematic of its importance to my practice. A hand pulled mechanical arm holding a squeegee pulls ink across paper, finessing exact pressure and movement over each pass. Silkscreen requires competency of the technical variables, which are wide and borderline alchemical. My approach to the printing setup is meticulous and requires patience, but beneath a squeegee’s blade, artworks that sometimes have taken months to produce are realised. Beyond the setup, within a work’s creation, I like to weave in opportunities to experiment, to stumble upon moments of the unexpected.
As an artist influenced by folk customs, myth, and the Arts & Crafts movement, how do you see these elements playing out in "Under the Laurels," especially in conversation with the works of Paul Nash and Dora Carrington?
Thomas - Just as Carrington and Nash are conduits to these themes in their own works, the group of artists gathered in “Under the Laurels” have likewise infused their own implicit sense of relationship to the landscape and figures that inhabit them. Nash’s works more overtly suggest that nature, mythology, and the past are inextricably linked, and the landscape itself becomes a backdrop where ancient myths and modern concerns coexist as a repository of memory. There is something characteristically soothing in this calcifying attitude, but I find myself as engaged by the sense of beauty and focus on the intimate that Carrington breathes into the relationships and the explicit inner world present in her works; they are personal mythologies that she creates. My sense of practice is almost certainly a mediation of these ideas, a sentiment perhaps shared by my fellow exhibitors.
Your art is shaped by a fascination with the "provenance and degradation of story through “authorship." In the prints from your graphic novel, how do you see this theme coming to life? - What do you hope viewers take away from these layers of inherited and evolved narrative?
I’ve found that people typically share deep lines of affinity to stories felt personally or by those they care for. It provides a semblance of identity, that I am one of many before me. The provenance of the graphic novel’s story starts with my great- grandfather, but by nature of degradation; the story not being written down and being retold down the family line three generations now, the malleability of its truth comes into question. Does this fact change my feeling of affection for the story? No, the imperfection of its degradation makes it more relatable. The same can be said of the prints, they are vignettes of layering that give semblance to what might have happened, not what absolutely must have.
Thomas Compton, Ferrara Evening Dance, Screen Print
Much like the landscape paintings of Carrington, the imagery in "The De Chirico Horse" feels both dreamlike and rooted in history, with anonymous figures moving through expansive landscapes. Can you speak to the symbolism of the wooden horse and how it connects to the emotional and narrative core of these pieces?
Thomas - The aura of the carving, much like the creation of the prints illuminates and is ode to the story encapsulated by its presence. The carving serves as motif, both as spiritual guide to the familial recount of the mythology garnered in the graphic novel, but also as homage to the animal’s presence in many De Chirico works. I too seem to gravitate back to the presence of the horse in my work somewhat subconsciously. A new piece in the works, rather in the lineage of Nash’s lithograph ‘The Landscape of the Megaliths’ (1937), but rather more intimate in nature and aligned to Carrington’s ‘Fairground at Henley Regatta’ (1921) focuses on the mythology around the stone barrow Wayland’s Smithy. The legend recounts the blacksmith turned farrier god Wayland shoeing horses tethered outside the confines of the barrow on being left a silver coin.