The Mountain Valley Arts Council at 300 Gunter Avenue, Guntersville, Alabama, is hosting a reception for artist Tommy Thompson beginning at 6 p.m. on Monday, June 2, 2008. This reception will launch a month-long exhibition through June 30 of Thompson's paintings entitled "A Study in Light and Shadows: A Solo Exhibition by Tommy Thompson," at the Council's Gallery on Gunter Avenue. The Gallery's hours of operation are Monday through Friday from 9 to 4 p.m. and other times by appointment (telephone: 256-571-7199).
The artist will be donating 20% of the proceeds from the sale of the paintings to the Arts Council. Refreshments will be provided during the reception. Come to meet the artist and learn about his interesting life of travel, painting on location, and what inspires him to paint the world around us.
Tommy Thompson was an architectural and commercial illustrator for more than 30 years before moving on to painting oil landscapes in 2003. He now concentrates on painting pastoral landscapes that include horses. His paintings are impressionistic in style and evoke a sense of peace. Tommy Thompson Art recently ranked No. 33 on the top 100 web sites out of 2,000 artists on Fine Art Studio Online. The Top 100 is calculated based on a mathematical formula called focal point rank (FPRank). FPRank considers popularity, traffic, content, recency and a variety of factors.
Thompson has studied under some of the nation's top painters including Kevin Macpherson, Ken Auster, Kenn Backhaus, Roger Dale Brown, John Budicin, Scott Christensen, Ned Mueller, Michael Shane Neal, Jason Saunders, and Dawn Whitelaw. During the past year, he has been invited to show his work in four solo exhibitions by various art associations and dealers in Birmingham, Guntersville, Memphis, and Nashville. Thompson is a member of the Oil Painters of America, Portrait Society of America, Landscape Artists International, Alabama Plein Air Painters, Art for Patronage, and the Chestnut Group, a nonprofit alliance of landscape artists of Nashville, TN. The artist's childhood near Starkville, MS, instilled in him a love of nature. Now living near the banks of the Tennessee River in Florence, Alabama, Thompson receives inspiration for his plein-air landscape paintings from the natural surroundings. He is represented by Willis-Gray Gallery, Decatur, AL; Loblolly Interior Market, Columbia, TN; and the Heirloom Shop, Franklin, TN.
The Mountain Valley Arts Council (MVAC) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts in and around Marshall County, Alabama. The MVAC was originally founded in 1971 and strives to keep quality arts programs alive and growing. The MVAC's goal is to encourage all forms of art. The Arts Council fosters the expansion of art appreciation and participation by presenting a wide variety of art and cultural activities. The Arts Council operates under a Board of Directors that includes members from all areas of the county. These hard-working volunteers help make MVAC's activities possible through their ideas, talents, service and their commitment to the arts. The MVAC operates through a combination of annual grants and the continued generous support of its patrons. Aside from being active supporters of the arts, the patrons enjoy special membership benefits.
