The American painter occupies a strong position in today’s religious and political thinking, and his viewpoints shape his art

In an age of extremism, the art of William Thomas Thompson (b. 1935) extends above and beyond the merely unconventional. His political and religious beliefs are neither on the extreme right nor the extreme left. While the messages of other apocalyptic artists of a fundamentalist-Christian orientation may appear to be coming from a similar place, none have spelled themselves out as explicitly as those within the texts that appear in Thompson’s paintings, particularly his seven most recently created works.

Thompson, who lives in Greenville, South Carolina, began his career in 1961 as a wholesaler of artificial flowers, built up a million-dollar business in the United States, and then expanded his enterprise to Hong Kong. However, through a series of financial downturns, his business collapsed in the 1980s. As a result, he believes his psychological well-being suffered and led to his developing Guillan-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder. While attending a Sunday church service in Hawaii, 1989, he recalled, “I saw a vision of the coming of the Lord and the world on fire on July 6, 1989.” Thompson regards his epiphany, he said, “as an unmistakable command to paint what I saw”. Since then, he has produced thousands of paintings. He noted, “I feel spiritually motivated to paint the truth condemning the world system as the spirit enlightens me to the pitfalls laid down by the Antichrist.”

Not one to be swept up in the voluptuous materialism of painterly realism, he never attempted to practise a formal technique. Instead, his work offers the raw realism of spontaneous expression – rough images by an artist whose brushstrokes reflect the tremors caused by a neurological condition that causes pain and weakness in his hands, and has paralysed Thompson below the knees.
“I do all [of my] painting flat down, either on my table or on the floor”, he explained.

My table is 10 by 16 feet long. […] [With] my large canvases, I […] either sit on the table on top of the canvas to paint or lie down on the canvas to steady my right arm to paint. I never sketch out any art [or] fill in the spaces. [...] I would like to say in all this that I am the servant, not the artist, in terms of spiritual inspiration that I cannot fully explain.

Thompson’s resulting images may be less refined than those of Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900–1980), the New Orleans-based painter of biblical-themed pictures, but their composition has greater range and rhythm than the paintings of the Mississippi-based Mary T Smith (1904–1995), two other American self-taught artists who were inspired by Christian themes. Thompson usually makes up for what he lacks in formal technique with dramatic arrangements of figures and other elements within his compositions, as well as with his lavish use of vivid colours.

As in the paintings of Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), the writings of the Christian mystic Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) illustrated by Dionysius Andreas Freher (1649–1728), or the images produced by artists to accompany compilations of occult philosophy assembled by the English physician Robert Fludd (1574–1637), there appears to be a kind of sacred geometry in the structures of Thompson’s diagrammatic paintings. However, unlike the geometry related to af Klint, Böhme and Fludd, Thompson undermines his spiritual and political symbols by adding texts that show them to be corrupted by dark meanings. Just as his good friend and fellow apocalyptic visionary, the late Norbert Kox (1945–2018), painted portraits of a faux Jesus Christ, Thompson takes such sacrosanct symbols as the American flag and the Star of David and reveals what he claims are their deceptive and misleading meanings.

caption: The Toxic Dollar, A Weapon of Mass Destruction, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 15 x 12 ft / 4.6 x 3.7 m