Bio
Christopher Thompson is an award-winning British figurative painter whose richly atmospheric oil paintings have established him as one of the most distinctive contemporary portrait and narrative artists working in the UK today. Born in Grimsby in 1969 and now based in London, Thompson studied at Norwich School of Art before completing his postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools in 1997. His work draws on the long tradition of British figurative painting whilst remaining resolutely contemporary, exploring quiet interior worlds, isolated figures, and architecturally inflected scenes, most recently through his celebrated “House” series of imagined dwellings for naturalists, cartographers, oceanographers and polar explorers.
History
Thompson’s training laid the foundation for a career rooted in classical technique and contemporary sensibility. At Norwich School of Art he received the Noël Spencer Award for Painting in 1994, going on to win both the George Isted Prize for Portrait Painting (1996) and the Armitage Prize for Painting (1997) during his time at the Royal Academy Schools. His portrait of the actor Pete Postlethwaite was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery shortly after graduation, and he was shortlisted for the Villiers David Prize in 2003.
Christopher Thompson has exhibited widely at home and abroad, with solo exhibitions at ArtsHouse and Albemarle Gallery, and has been included in numerous prestigious mixed shows. His work is held in private and public collections internationally, and he continues to exhibit regularly with Byard Art in Cambridge, where his House series paintings have become highly sought after.
Style & Technique
Christopher Thompson’s painting style sits within the lineage of British figurative tradition – he has described himself as “a resolutely figurative artist” whose work “echoes a debt to the tradition from which it evolves, from Caravaggio to Vermeer on to Degas, Caillebotte and Hopper, whilst being resolutely contemporary in appearance.”
His technique favours a subdued palette, a hazy painterly surface, and carefully orchestrated compositions in which posture, gesture and glance carry the narrative weight. In his recent House series, Thompson turns the same sensibility toward architecture, painting imagined houses for fictional inhabitants, the Naturalist, the Cartographer, the Oceanographer, the Polar Explorer, each rendered in oil with a quiet, dreamlike stillness that elevates the everyday into the timeless.
