Cappy Thompson:
Thinking of Angels 

March 8 - April 19, 2025

artist talk April 5th 2pm

“Thinking of Angels,” a 16-piece exhibition of multi-dimensional work by Seattle-based artist Cappy Thompson, distills the philosophical and material practices of one of the most innovative artists working in glass of the last five decades to put forward a universal truth: what happens next is a mystery to us all. Drawing on spiritual imagery from myriad religious and geographical references, Thompson uses glass, among the most ancient of media, to absorb narrative explorations into spirituality and the permeability between embodied life and what exists beyond. Glass is among the most transformative of media, shapeshifting from liquid to solid, orb to vessel to plane. Within its fragility, its spontaneity, and the danger it presents when shattered, from the fiery depths to the divinity of refracted light, perhaps better than any other medium, glass – in its many forms and material properties - mirrors human existence.

Thompson has hailed from Seattle nearly since birth. She studied printmaking and painting at Evergreen State College in Olympia, and apprenticed at Olympia-based Mansion Glass Company, a stained glass production firm, where she began researching glass painting. Thompson learned techniques through her own research and experimentation, refining her skills in stained glass for a decade. At an invitation to paint on a fellow artist’s blown-glass blank, Thompson reveled in the ability to more effectively produce narratives in three dimensions, and her practice shifted to follow suit into reverse-painting on glass vessels. Her reputation for self-taught technical mastery made possible her entrée into large-scale architectural commissions, most notably I was Dreaming of Spirit Animals (2003) at Seattle Tacoma International Airport. Projecting autobiographical references into her largest and most public of installations, it propelled Thompson’s introspective expression further.

Thompson’s career evolution in style and technique has resulted in her most poignant recent works in “Thinking of Angels.” These domestic-scaled paintings and vessels are imbued with her multi-disciplinary approach and visual language, simultaneously telegraphing tradition and innovation, antiquity and contemporaneity, delivered as exquisitely crafted artwork. Light – its admittance and encapsulation – has remained an imperative additional medium in Thompson’s art. The properties of glass that permit light, through curvature, dimensionality and optic enhancement, express, materially, the ethereal notions Thompson wrestles with.

While glass has been historically linked with death and the afterlife, appearing in coffin designs and artful receptacles for remains and reliquaries, Thompson’s use of glass here keeps clear distance from the physical reality of death and instead focuses on bringing the spirituality into a tangible focus. Her removal from the actual production of glass (she collaborates with glassblowers to create the bodies upon which she paints or engraves) injects another layer separating her from the clarity of the phenomenon she illustrates.

The distance from the direct production of the glass has also served another purpose for Thompson: the ability to work for decades virtually unscathed by repudiation in a medium long dominated by purists of craft, aligning herself with both painting and glassmaking as a sort of collaborative, nonconfrontational ally. In doing so, she has achieved the acclaim of the highest canons of contemporary glass lore during its peak of lionization in craft circles – the recognition of Pilchuck, Tacoma, Corning and the Smithsonian. Through Thompson’s graphic experimentation of grisaille in an underrecognized labor- and detail-intensive method of utilizing glass and vitreous enamels, she has emerged a pioneer, sidestepping the tightly-guarded glassmaker pantheon and expertly affirming, instead, the glass vessel’s strength of narrative story-telling and movement.

Wheel engraving is the most recent technical addition to Thompson’s practice, which she adopted in 2013 to achieve a near fiberoptic quality of radiant color and light on a glass surface. Some of the first engraved works, Dandelion and Celestial Rider, show Thompson’s quick mastery of texture, buffing the cut glass with pumice to emphasize undulations of animal fur or to mimic woven fibers. Textile manipulation once again finds reference in Guardian Angels, which shows Thompson’s ability to achieve graphic clarity without her trademark grisaille. Here, the white painted surface replicates delicate lace patterning to gossamer effect.

Thompson’s own likeness appears throughout “Thinking of Angels.” As the protagonist of Dive, she is shown mid-leap, surrounded by angels and moons above and below. In Blessing, she enjoys a protected rest. By including herself in the imagery, Thompson enters the narrative plane, symbolically confronting physical and the spiritual fluidity.

In “Thinking of Angels,” Thompson’s restraint of color, and in some cases the near absence of any, is perhaps the most noted transition in her work of the last decade. Blues and greens dominate the painted landscapes, with the repeated peppering of celestial, avian, mythical and botanical motifs. The reflection of the aluminum substrate of each painting, and the translucency of the engraved and painted surfaces, magnifies the ethereal effect to satisfy Thompson’s exploration into this subject matter. The imagery has remained consistently enigmatic; however, the riotous color present in Thompson’s work from the 1970s through 90s has given way to a serene elegance, the sort of graceful calm achieved only through decades of experience.
 -Meaghan Roddy

PRESS: “Seattle artist displays intricate glasswork, medieval techniques” By Gayle Clemans February 6, 2025 The Seattle Times ︎

New Day Northwest with Nancy Guppy, February 27, 2025 King 5 ︎

Art Zone: Cappy Thompson, visual artist, by Pete Cassam and Annabel Cassam, November 9, 2023 Seattle Channel︎