Opening night of the Thomas Swopes exhibition in the Swope Art Museum is 6 to 8 p.m. Feb. 2.
Swopes has been making art for over four decades. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Indiana University with a master’s degree in sculpture. He is an Indiana Arts Commission Fellowship recipient. He has won numerous awards and his work can be found in public and private collections in the United States and abroad.
Swopes has been teaching drawing, painting and sculpture at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College for 19 years. He would say he teaches people, not subjects.
Swopes is a storyteller and at its core, his work is expressionist in nature. While his work is a personal narrative, his themes are universal and depict the basic experiences shared by everyone.
Jungian in his perspective, his work reflects themes of balance by addressing the polarities necessary to any self-regulating system: life and death, joy and sorrow, happiness and sadness, hope and despair, light and dark, gain and loss, creation and destruction. Much of his work is dreamlike and appears to be a reflection on the journey of life and the passage from this life to the next.
Stylistically, Swopes’ artwork is a mixed bag from the abstract to the realistic. His paintings exhibit the controlled energy of Pollack, the whimsy and childlike nature of Miro and Klee, and the bold color of Gaugan.
Similar to Escher, he uses figure/ground reversals, with color juxtapositions to engage the viewers psychologically as they try to make sense of what they are seeing. Swopes also uses the figure, whether human or animal, to connect with the viewer psyche, but places those figures in a dreamlike setting.
He often juxtaposes Christian symbols with Native American ones, as well as images from popular culture with images of a bygone era when life was simpler.
