James B. Thompson: The Vanishing Landscape

This book on the contemporary painter and printmaker James B. Thompson is a meditation on the possibility of discovering, in an American landscape wracked by the devastation of global warming, flood, drought, and environmental disaster, an uncanny beauty, even a source of affirmation and hope. Thompson’s entirely abstract canvases and prints offer themselves up as metaphors for landscape, as terrains full of incident designed to reveal not only a sense of what we have lost but the creative energy necessary to renew our imaginative capacity to move on. They constitute a new sublime, a vision of something infinite that we cannot quite comprehend, even as they seek to convey landscape’s very essence.

Henry M. Sayre’s introductory essay and commentaries on individual works place Thompson’s work in the context of landscape painting as a whole and offer the viewer insight into the meaning of the works themselves.