Deanna Thompson

b. 1958

For more than three decades, Deanna Thompson has been influenced by the vast landscape of the California desert.  Living and working in near total isolation, Thompson authentically explores the modern tension that exists between society and the environment and between the temporary and the permanent. Through her subject matter she addresses issues of memory, time and the forgotten and explores the current transformation of landscape from the inhabited to the abandoned.

She uses as her subject matter deserted homesteads, discarded man-made objects, and cast-off debris as a way to examine time and define space in an otherwise vast expanse of endless sky and ground. There is a shifting level of complexity in her paintings ranging between realism and abstraction which spills out into the desert landscape.

In much the same way that Robert Rauschenberg found beauty in the dilapidated and worn, Thompson is drawn to a landscape that shows the marks of human activity.  With a contrary sense of beauty and an appreciation of the absurd, Thompson reinterprets and reinvents the romantic view of landscape painting in favor of one that is unsentimental and rooted firmly in the present. 

Deanna Thompson was born in Bakersfield, California and graduated from CSU, Bakersfield. She resides in Yucca Valley, California.