“Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself. It is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.”
Robert Motherwell
“Vital organisation is the frame of all feeling.”
Susanne K. Langer
Ann Thomson celebrated her ninetieth birthday in October 2023. Born in Queensland in 1933, the daughter of a prominent Brisbane bookseller, she was genteelly brought up but was given plenty of leeway to express her natural physical exuberance. At her school, Somerville House, all of her art teachers (Caroline Barker, Patricia Prentice, June Meek, Betty Churcher) were practising artists; they not only stood as role models for their young pupil, they recognised Ann’s talent and encouraged her to consider art as her life’s pursuit. In Anna Johnson’s monograph on Ann Thomson there is a photograph of the teenaged Ann leaping down the side of a sand dune—an image that reveals the high-spiritedness of her character. Such physical vigour has come to define her painting idiom, an idiom that has never stood still, never lost its momentum or intensity, and has grown more robust and fearless with the passing years.
The French painter Jean Bazaine believed that painters were born old and only achieved the quality of youthfulness as a reward for the devotion of their labours: “Youthfulness in painting is slowly attained. It is granted as a reward to the old-timers who merit it. You need to drink long and deeply of the milk of life before it starts to go to
