The Tao of Thompson
Anita Euteneier
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Soucy, the Quebec performance artist at the far left, poses with his bike and Thompson's art class outside Arts Court
photo: Anita Euteneier
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Ottawa Graffiti artist makes his mark on youth, the city and its official plans for the future
"Graffiti is the streets talking to the buildings."-Susan Farrell, founder of the first graffiti website artcrimes.org (1996)It's one of the first days of spring, the sun is shining and a group of teenagers is sitting around a picnic table outside Arts Court sketching a guy on a stationary bicycle. It is a surreal life-imitating-art moment, the kind of serendipitous event artist Pat Thompson lives for. Moments earlier, the teens in his Ottawa Art Gallery workshop came outdoors and Thompson had no idea what the subject of their investigations would be. The guy on the bike is Soucy, a performance artist from Northern Quebec who just so happens to be riding a stationary bike across the country. His impromptu appearance makes for a fascinating subject.
This sort of freestyle approach to art and life is the Tao of Thompson. "I like to refer to it as mistake-ism," he says. "It's all based on encouraging the mistake and moving forward with haphazard things. It opens up the mind to possibilities."
At 26, Thompson has spent more than half his life making marks, on city streets and freight trains, and taking some big risks in his pursuit. As a graffiti artist he's known for his loose style, painting from inspiration in the moment, or "freestyle" in graf lingo. His first work when he was seven years old livened up his parent's house. "I took a pen and drew a snake on their banister all the way up to the third floor. My mom told me she wasn't going to remove it, but I had to colour it." The experience
was formative in that his attempts at art making were encouraged and fostered. "I was tagging everything by the time I was 14." ART CRIMINAL
He was introduced to graffiti when he moved to Ottawa from Chelsea. He started seeing goldfish images on walls and found out the guy who did them lived close by. Eric Grice took Thompson under his wing and introduced him to other graffiti artists, like Gene Pendon, one of the Heavyweight guys. Their work, and that of the city's early graf writers, can be seen at the Tech Wall, a kind of shrine to graffiti at Slater and Bronson. Long since they moved to Montreal, the Heavyweights have become a force on the international stage. "I was lucky enough to be the tagalong although they didn't treat me as a tagalong. When I first started doing it, graffiti wasn't hip; there were very few influences, no Internet." When he did find the Internet, Thompson hung out after school at the library where his mother worked and visited artcrimes.org, one of the first 500 websites in the world.
Thompson honed his drawing skills, found a mentor in the late Mark Marsters at the Ottawa School of Art, then spent some time at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. "Mark wasn't crazy about graffiti," he says with a laugh. "He had a strong code he lived by, and his ideas were of incredible positivity and joy." Later, Thompson worked for Marsters as a studio assistant. "Mark could work with the crudest materials. He purposefully did art about local things and he was about as giving as you could imagine."
Marsters died of complications from hemophilia in the winter of 2002, and it devastated Thompson. But it also made him determined to carry on Marsters' legacy of teaching and community service. It was around that time that he heard the green space next to the Tech Wall was going to be sold. "I was standing there near the wall and I looked behind me at the War Museum being built and the U.S. war in Iraq was starting," he says. "I thought, 'This place has to stay.' The reason I do what I do is that place, and the people I've met through that place. Maybe I'm sentimental but for some reason it was the hub and the home for all these people who have gone on to do things that I consider great."
Thompson aligned himself with Robin Sokolowski, a community arts specialist with the City of Ottawa who has since moved on. "She wanted to have the Tech Wall designated as a historical landmark," says Thompson. "It's been around for 15 years and is the oldest landmark of youth culture." Together, Thompson and Sokolowski came up with a name for the land adjacent to the Tech Wall owned by the Ottawa Board of Education. They called it Piece Park, and with the support of city councillors Diane Holmes and Clive Doucette, and philanthropist Dave Smith, they held a number of community events to hype it. Thompson says maintaining the park is part of a larger vision of converting the former Ottawa Technical School, which is virtually vacant, into a central high school for the arts. "That space is on the best bus route in the very centre of the city. It fulfills what the City of Ottawa's 20/20 [official city] plan seeks to do: to bring art to a street level and create a more rounded art base in the centre of the city." Ottawa 20/20 is a 20-year plan to accommodate Ottawa's growing population.
ART ACTIVIST
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Thompson : urban activist with a plan for the Ottawa Tech School
Photo: Aaron McKenzie Fraser
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Thompson's commitment to community service began with his work for special-needs groups at the City's community arts program, and for the Active Living Alliance of Canada. Murals he created with young people with multiple disabilities can be seen at Carleton University and the Hintonburg Community Centre. "When you are in the situation, you are forced to realize your own phobias and you learn to see only the light and the goodness in someone." Thompson advises artists who are "suffering in their expression and dry on ideas" to go and work with kids. "It's the best feeling in the universe. You go back to your work. And you don't care if it looks like crap, that's when the best stuff happens, when it's raw, very rough, no pretension."Graffiti has evolved," he says, "It's less extroverted and macho, more image based with more of a fine art approach." To illustrate his point he mentions the latest escapades of a British graffiti artist known as Banksy, who last month disguised himself as a pensioner and hung his work in four major art institutions in New York, including MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum, where it took officials four days to discover they weren't part of the museum's permanent collection.
Ironically, Thompson has been awarded a commission by the National Capital Commission to paint a mural under the Champlain Bridge as a deterrent to graffiti artists.
And his work is being shown in fine art galleries. Thompson has a solo exhibition titled Dripping Intuit at Artguise Gallery. "At first I drew googly-eyed guys and silly things," he says, surveying the dozen or so canvases he's just completed for the Artguise show, "and I guess I still do." Each of the paintings is an adventure in paint, with a story and often a message. Thompson addresses environmental degradation from clear cutting, something he witnessed first hand while writing on freight trains across Canada. He painted another work in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, after visiting Taiwan's Tzu Chi Foundation, a Buddhist charitable organization that responds to worldwide disasters and promotes community volunteerism. "They were the first organization to respond to the disaster, sending doctors, nuns and monks. One of the nuns I talked to took the symbol of the wave as a million prayers of love going across the sea," explains Thompson.
Pat Thompson's work can also be seen in OFFGRID, an exhibition at the Ottawa Art Gallery that explores the margins of urban culture. The work is a large-scale mural created live with compatriots Juan Carlos Noria, Other and Lebrona, opening on April 7 at 5:30 p.m. (Free).
Public interventions and performances by students from local high schools, created as part of a workshop held at OAG in March and April with Ottawa artists Dawn Dale, Claude Latour and Patrick Thompson, continue throughout the exhibition until June 5.
Dripping Intuit, New Works by Pat Thompson, opens on Friday April 8, at 7:30 p.m., at the Artguise Gallery (590 Bank Street).
hey.. ok so i'm looking to do a personal project with a graffiti artist.. just a small commitment needed. I'd definitely be willing to pay as long as the work is worth it.
please contact me if you could refer anyone to me. i'd appreciate it.
thankx,
Eddy Martins
(917)4004883
emartins7@hotmail.com
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ednaldo martins
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Things like the tech wall are ok. Makes for something to look at on the way into work. The rest of it, especially the garbage we see all over buses, mailboxes, people's fences in neighborhoods, is terrible. No appeal, no use, no positive impact, just a drain.
Get a real job and grow up Pat. You're 26, not 16. Get a life.
Stop making the rest of us pay out of taxes for your wasted life.
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Mike Smith
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| Ottawa still holds a piece of my heart |
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kOttawa for six years going to school and soaking in its creative potential. A potential that is often suppressed by the capital city's demand for unadorned grey spaces so, that it may relay the illsion that Ottawa is safe, clean, and in perfect working order. However, there is something unique there in Ottawa that is peering through the concrete cracks that if full colour, light and enthusiasm. Although I am aware of the fact that this will be an ongoing struggle, I feel as though Ottawa is finally taking notice to its underlying potential by inviting artists such Pat Thompson to exhibit at the Ottawa Art Gallery and with the City's attempt at making Ottawa a more creative city (20/20 plan).
I now live in Toronto, but my heart is still very much with Ottawa's art community. THERE REALLY IS NOTHING LIKE IT and I hope that the people who live there encourage its growth.
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Robin Sokoloski
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{9 votes}
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This is just the kind of input the city needs. A real street artist with a grasp of multimedia suggesting a great location for an art-oriented high school. How many youth are floundering in the regimented sytematic instititutions now? Many, I suppose. I was not overly impressed with the work at ArtGuise, yet, can't help but be slightly grateful that art of this nature seems to be selling here in Ottawa, often seen as a rather staid, conservative market.
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Skeleton James
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{16 votes}
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Most of the grafitti around Ottawa looks gross and is more in the vandalism category. Can anybody specify the location of one that actually has any merit and is thought provoking? Even the Ottawa ones on that art crimes web page are mostly just messy text (somebody's name or something).
The most creative one I can remember is an alien downtown near the top of a building. That drawing is not even very well made. Well, I guess the painter was in a hurry.
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Sue Michal
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{6 votes}
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I've been taking pictures of graffiti both in Ottawa and in Toronto for the last six years. I do this not only to document it before it's covered by another piece, but also as an apprieciation of the obvious artistic merits. I have some of the pics on my blog at www.ravensview.ca, and linked thru there, also on a Flickr site.
I met Pat, as well as Robin and others, at the Piece Park kickoff, and was impressed with the work he did, organizing and motivating. I hope that initiative stays alive.
The Tech wall is still active, as is under the Bronson bridge - hopefully both areas keep going for a long time. I've even seen photo shoots that were done there - for cars, and for clothing. Graffiti is an important part of the art and communication in our cities, and should have areas like the above where it is encouraged and appreciated.
Interesting that Pat is doing a mural under the Champlain bridge - is this to be sprayed or brushed on??
I'm even tempted to have one of these excellent artists do a piece on my garage door - out here in Orleans. Maybe I'll start a trend on my quiet suburban street.
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Mike Young
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{7 votes}
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