Cappy Thompson is a seeker.
For decades, the 73-year-old Seattle artist has studied world folklore, esoteric philosophies and religion, and has sought out the most luminously effective materials and techniques to reveal stories through art.
An upcoming solo exhibition at studio e in Georgetown, “Thinking of Angels” (March 8 to April 19), will show off Thompson’s fascinating art, techniques and perspective.
Known for her mythical-spiritual works of art in glass, a medium that’s “mysterious and full of magic,” Thompson describes herself as a painter. As is typical for Thompson and her work, multiple things can be true at once.
She is quick to smile even as she recounts interests in theosophy and mythology. Her artistic style of simplified forms and folk aesthetics harmonizes with complex narratives, and her preference for premodern and medieval stories and styles lives in comfortable contradiction with her occasional use of new technologies.
The same artist who uses age-old craft processes as she paints onto the backside of glass panels or etches into glass vessels has also invented new ways to make objects out of her panels and to increase their brightness.
“Thinking of Angels” will showcase painted glass panels that Thompson has glued to a brushed aluminum surface, reflecting transparent colors. Mounted on chunky wood frames, the edges are finished with Venetian gesso and silver leaf, further increasing the altarpiece-like quality of these beautiful objects.
In the titular panel “Thinking of Angels,” a bob-haired figure sits in a garden of flowers, reaching up to a pantheon of angels. The angels, with their placid faces, multicolored wings and protective hand gestures, are set above the earthly realm but also very much part of it.
The artist and researcher can speak about the presence of angels in various cultures and the hierarchies of angels and their meanings, always returning to the fundamental goals for her work.
The layered beauty and lush color of Thompson’s pieces are meant to be welcoming, allowing you to “feel a sense of well-being, as if you were held by them.” While every work of art is launched with a story in mind, as she conjures up images and narratives from her research, Thompson is happy “when people find their own meaning in them.”
Thompson’s home and studio in Georgetown envelop and embody a career’s worth of experimentation. The open space holds workstations, neat rows of brushes and tools, cases full of books, and lots of art both by Thompson and other artists. With its banks of windows looking out over the industrial neighborhood and its wood floors dotted with colorful carpets, the studio is a creative haven.
In the studio, Thompson demonstrated how she paints on the interior of a vase or the back of a handblown panel, removing areas of the enamel paint with dry brushes. This aptitude for thinking in reverse, from the outside in and the inside out, is based in part on her initial training as a printmaker at The Evergreen State College.
Moving to another vase, Thompson spoke about how painting on three-dimensional forms was an aha moment for her, allowing her to think differently about relationships between two and three dimensions and about metaphorical ideas about space, bodies and containers.
These lessons proved invaluable when it came to conceptualizing even bigger projects, as when she proposed a piece for the enormous wall of windows in Sea-Tac Airport’s south concourse, completed in 2003. Concerned about filling up such a huge expanse, she realized she could treat it like an unfolded vessel, with areas of positive and negative space.
After landing that commission, Thompson went on to create public works for the Museum of Glass, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and her alma mater, and for exhibitions across the U.S., Japan and Australia. These glass projects, with their vivid colors and sweeping, folkloric scenes, feel akin to stained-glass windows by Marc Chagall, the French-Russian modernist with a penchant for poetic, heavily outlined figures swirling amid cobalt blues.
But Thompson should also be contextualized closer to home. Melissa E. Feldman, independent curator and writer, included Thompon’s work in a 2022 traveling exhibition titled “Indie Folk: New Art and Songs from the Pacific Northwest.” She said that “Thompson is the quintessential Northwest artist in that her work is grounded in crafts and a kind of global folkloric.
“These qualities also happen to make Northwest art so relevant right now, as the art world comes to terms with longstanding hierarchical structures that have sidelined crafts and the non-Western or rural, cultural ways that often go with them.”
Dawna Holloway, founder of studio e, underscored “the timeless beauty of Cappy’s imagery in etched glass and cobalt blue enamel painting” and said Thompson is “one of the great artists from the region.”
But there was a time when things weren’t so certain. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Thompson’s life and work upended and shifted after going through a divorce. She began to include herself more directly into her work, as seen in the bob-haired female figure who travels through Thompson’s vessels and panels, encountering gods and goddesses, dreams and gifts. Thompson threw herself “into the world myth, the hero’s journey,” the artist said, smiling in her Seattle studio, “working through the issues of an average life with these epic ideas.”
Thompson’s most recent work is less overtly autobiographical, but it is still imbued with themes of searching and encountering the divine. Guardian beings, often in the form of angels or animals, visit the settings she creates with fluid, mottled layers of dark and teal blue, giving them a feeling of unfathomable richness and profound tranquility.
Her work has gotten “much more celestial, more cosmic in the last 10 years,” Thompson said, in part from realizing that “death is something to get friendly with as you get older.” The loss of her second husband made Thompson immensely grateful for the intellectual curiosity they shared and everything they learned about living consciously.
Recently, it’s become even clearer what she wants her art to accomplish: “Love is the main thing. My work expresses hope and love.”