Friday, August 8 2025 through Friday, September 12, 2025
Opening Reception: 6-9 p.m. Friday, August 8
Pictured: Pigtails, 9.5x11.5”, oil on board, 2024
Annie would like to thank The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation for its financial support in creating this body of work
Artist Biography:
Annie Thompson is a Philadelphia-based painter and art educator. She holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and a BFA from Flagler College. In 2024, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant for emerging representational artists. Annie’s work—primarily in oil and charcoal—focuses on perceptual and direct painting and drawing. She currently teaches at Wayne Art Center and exhibits nationally, most recently in her solo show Rehearsals at Side Street Gallery in Philadelphia. To view her portfolio, visit
www.anniethompson-fineart.com.
Artist Statement:
I am an artist working within a representational tradition, with a focus on perceptual and alla prima painting. I am interested in highlighting subtle painterly opportunities—which might otherwise be overlooked in waking life—that demonstrate how our visual expectations are constantly contested when we open our eyes empirically. My process includes arranging still-life setups and staging costumed self-portraits within the studio in high contrast lighting, where I explore object relationships, unconventional pictorial fields, and thematic color families. These subjects are to be used as departure points for my perceptual queries. I find that simple discretions and improvisations perceptual painters make may not fully capture “the real,” but instead speak to their account of or attitude towards their subject matter. In this, I see the artist’s role as frustratingly humorous—I prompt myself to make observational discoveries and find opportunities for invention, but am continuously humbled by my failures to translate the image. I like to carry this jest over to my subject matter, neighboring the serious nature of self-portraiture with playful personifications of objecthood, often treating myself as one of the props. Ultimately, this body of work carries the idea that we should not take the individual painting too seriously, yet remain curious about what perceptual painting can reflect from our lived visual experiences.