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.