September Optimism works in an extreme vertical format, a narrow column that operates as a concentrated shaft of light. The eye follows warm oranges and russet reds upward from a darkened base through golds and yellows toward a luminous apex. The proportions change what the painting does: where broader canvases invite peripheral awareness, this one demands upward tracking, the color rising as the eye rises with it. The title names a season’s emotional logic; the composition embodies it: warmth rising out of weight.
September Optimism works in an extreme vertical format, a narrow column that operates as a concentrated shaft of light. The eye follows warm oranges and russet reds upward from a darkened base through golds and yellows toward a luminous apex. The proportions change what the painting does: where broader canvases invite peripheral awareness, this one demands upward tracking, the color rising as the eye rises with it. The title names a season’s emotional logic; the composition embodies it: warmth rising out of weight.
The chromatic progression from earth tones at the base to a warm, light-flooded apex has a structural parallel in Morris Louis’s Veil paintings, where poured pigment organized itself in vertical bands of increasing luminosity. The parallel is compositional rather than technical: Louis worked with thinned Magna on unprimed canvas, the color staining rather than accumulating. Thompson’s surface is built and subtracted; the verticality is willed. But both understood that a vertical axis of increasing light is among painting’s most direct equivalents of aspiration.
The veil texture here is at its most resolved: the drip lines run clean and parallel, the layering visible but not labored. September in British Columbia carries a specific quality of light, the warmth intensifying before departure, and this painting captures that chromatic fact without illustrating it. It is, as Thompson describes all her work, nature’s visual elements brought into color: not a landscape seen but a landscape felt, the emotional residue of a season translated into vertical light.
