Ian Thompson – June 1937 – July 2018
NDD, DA (Manc.), ATC, MRBS (formerly ARBS), FRSA, PPMAFA.
Born 1937 in Manchester, brought up in Preston, Ian Thompson trained at the Regional College of Art, Manchester.
“In the sculpture department we had to make a piece of work specifically for our final year show. I chose to do Diana and the Hounds (life size). Fine, but I chose to include three Afghan Hounds (to be different?)! Siegfried Charoux, our external examiner, a big, impressive man with large, sensitive hands and steel blue eyes hated the hounds. He gave me the biggest verbal hammering. He even suggested I might be better off concentrating on painting! So suddenly the tirade was over and he said quietly how much he liked the female figure; I was, perhaps to my surprise awarded the College Diploma.”
He taught in Comprehensive schools in Preston, initially in charge of three-dimensional art and design then as Head of Department. At the end of a career in teacher education he became Director of the School of Creative Arts in Education in the Birmingham Polytechnic Faculty of Education.
“At Manchester Regional College of Art I specialised in Modelling and Sculpture but my enthusiasm for the three dimensional has spilled over into other media to express my ideas. For instance I became a founder member of Unit Five Seven, a film unit dedicated to real people, very much in the same idiom as Free Cinema. Indeed influential film makers like Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson were very supportive. Mike Grigsby’s film ‘Enginemen’ was selected by the British Film Institute to represent Britain in the USSR (as was) and I acted as continuity on that film and did the titles. My drawing of the steam engine sheds at Newton Heath, Manchester, was the opening shot.”
In 1987 Thompson chose to retire from teaching to work full-time as an artist. Elected to the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts in 1990, he served as President from 1997-2003. Listed as an approved artist with the Church of England Council for the Care of Churches in 1991 he was invited by the Cathedrals’ Fabric Commission to serve on the Fabric Advisory Committee of Coventry Cathedral.
“Perhaps my versions of Ecce Homo owe something to my first sighting of Epstein’s colossus in a Battersea Park exhibition? In both cases I used dead sycamore with scars and refilled rotten patches to express both strength and weakness- in the words of the poet and preacher John Donne, “…vile man’s flesh”. I have concentrated on the head, strong in form as a section of trunk and weak in the blemishes of fallen tree pierced by a steel crown of thorns. This is intended to exemplify the vicious and mocking cruelty man too often perpetrates on man.”
In 1993 he and his family moved to the Yorkshire Pennines.
In 1996 Thompson was elected Associate Member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. Examples of his work, including sculpture in steel and various hardwoods, paintings, textiles and stained glass, are in various collections throughout the UK.
The Last Supper carved in iroko and part of the interior design of a Preston church; also aluminium altar cross with ceramic agnus dei.
Public commissions include altar frontals for churches in Lancashire, banners and frontal in Malvern, banner and stained glass window in Fenstanton, Cambridgeshire, steel Crown of Thorns in Clayton, Manchester, steel sculpture of Risen Christ for St Thomas Becket school, Wakefield and a woodcarving of The Virgin of the Annunciation for St Bede’s RC Church, Weaverham.
Municipal galleries in Blackburn and Southport own his work, a painting in oils and a steel Pelican sculpture respectively. A large steel sculpture of the Trinity was purchased for an episcopal church in San Francisco.
Awarded Life Membership of MAFA 2010
Ian Thompson was totally committed to the creative process, no matter what media, skills or themes employed. His interests include education, wildlife, choral music, religion, calligraphy and the communication that derives from creative expression. His work is exhibited on a regular basis in the Manchester area with the Academy and also from time to time in solo or selected group exhibitions.
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“Captive Man – Adam – Elm 1989 © Ian Thompson Artist.
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