Instagram story viewer> @callenthompson> Posts

Cal Thompson

@callenthompson

2.5K

followers

4124

following

Designer, painter, teacher
Next show: @ladesignweekend
📍'26 artist @vermontstudiocenter
📍'27 @studiokura

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

(( Ink on sandpaper on earth ))

#art #painting #summer #vermont taken in Montpelier, Vermont by @callenthompson

68

4

2 months ago

❄️ Snow
☸️ Mandala taken in Montpelier, Vermont by @callenthompson

58

3

8 months ago

A painting in reverse, from end to start. //

When I'm painting it is quiet.
Today, I listened to no music, just gave my attention and interest.
Poured them into a wooden box covered in white lime paint
covered in
sandpaper
wooden spheres
cut out clouds
blue
white sand mountains
brass nails
and a tiny cabbage palm I cut out a few months ago
constructed onto metal stilts
so its neon pink back can reflect the LA sun. taken in Santa Monica, California by @callenthompson

59

0

2 years ago

Blue is not a casual color to me. It can expand you. I can get lost in the wideness of this color, feeling it in my chest. It's so wide it presents itself as infinite. Like a perfect blue sky does. A version of this painting will be at the BLUE show in LA on Oct 3rd, during @ladesignweekend - curated by @studio.serpentine 🟦

Here's how the painting came to be-

part 2 of 3.

Part of the piece - see it all Oct 3 in LA at Winston's in Boyle Heights 🟦

Oil rig I saw in Houston on a research trip, 2014

La Calavera, San Juan Batista, CA

Florida nature whisperer, author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' home- Cross Creek, FL

December blue sky

Lime paint from @hilario_sf - so pigmented, so yummy

Edge of a Basquiat
Broad Museum, LA

Hap Tivey
Helios

at LACMA
LA Light & Color Movement show

Artist unknown
LACMA

Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing show

Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato

Brazilian painter (1900–1995)

Tires on a Gravel Driveway at Night, New Mexico (blue painting)
by me
2023

Postcard is of the big sacred Buddha of Kamakura, Japan

The legendary Orozco murals at @dartmouthcollege

Peace and art at @breadandpuppet / @breadandpuppetpress

California blue sky
Pacific Ocean /CA coast mural

Lorser Feitelson
Life Begins

1936!

At LACMA
and often on display upstairs

@ummmididntdoit at the @academymuseum

always

to you
to me
to we

unknown
@flemingmuseumofart taken in Los Angeles, California by @callenthompson

65

8

17 days ago

A version of this painting will be shown in the BLUE show at Winston's in Lincoln Heights during @ladesignweekend , curated by the fab @studio.serpentine. You'll have to attend to see the version... So, in honor of the show, here is how this painting came to be. My paintings are always love letters to materials or colors, and this blue is an awakening one. It's what some see in meditation. Others see it in the sky. Others paint their post office with it (Topanga Canyon).

chair in the perfect blue at a Shoreditch, London vintage store

The great Elizabeth Murray at @davidkordanskygallery

behind the scenes painting days

Wall in @andreapeneycad's neighborhood

Waves

Perfection by Ed Moses @williamturnergallery

funky so blue post office of Topanga Canyon

💓 Book about an icon, @vermontstudiocenter library

Homes

Yep

Unknown, at one of the Bergamot Galleries

Brilliant marks by @benlangwieder , in my cohort at @vermontstudiocenter

Indigo and sandpaper on my studio wall at @vermontstudiocenter

Cyanotypes of LA

Midcentury painter at @lacma

California State Parks

Home. Summer to fall blue sky. taken in Los Angeles, California by @callenthompson

65

15

a month ago

Newbie died a year ago today on his favorite bed, surrounded by people telling him we loved him, and was buried in the yard wrapped in blue woven ikat from @cliffsvarietyfabrics and covered in hydrangeas. He had cancer in his salivary gland that we identified (didn't notice until!) the day Bodhi died, and spent his last year being doted on with the same attention he'd just watched her receive, an important redistribution of attention that I wish could have lasted years. He became an absolute angel baby by the end, but first let me tell you about the beginning!
- In 2012 Jasmin saw Newbie being mistreated on the street in Monterrey, Mexico where she taught photography at the university. Ever a guardian, she jumped out of her maroon '74 VW van, snatched him up, + took him home. He was a skinny, tick-covered street puppy w/ 0 experience being indoors, very sweet, but incapable of managing the rough housing from her big dogs. So she got him shots + papers + drove the dangerous, hot AF August 8-hour journey to Austin w him trembling and barfing in back of the van all the way to deliver him to our door, arriving the same week we were both starting grad school at @ac4d. We were dumbstruck- how were we going to manage inheriting a street puppy while starting school?! But her act of selflessness had already set the standard - we were going to do anything for this little dude!
- We named him Anubis because he looked like the jackal God but that quickly became irrelevant, far too pretentious and serious for this little rascal. We called him Anu and that morphed to Noobs, and eventually Newbie. I've never known how to spell it, all spellings are correct.
- Right from the start, it was easy to see how he had ended up on the street. He'd jump off/out of anything with no consideration for landing. He'd climb the fence with his teeth, or squirm under it and run away as you stood there trying to play ball with him in the yard. We'd get calls from strangers saying he was chasing trucks down Oltorf multiple times a week. He was a man of the street and wanted to see the world!

More in the comments ~ by @callenthompson

195

29

a month ago

Summer is hard at work here in Vermont. She's filling the sky with blue, pumping up the white clouds, brightening the hills with bright green lush leaves.

The tomorrow of months will hold snow and the long quiet peace of winter.

The today of months and time now is loud with happy robins, bluejays, cardinals, crows feasting.

River flows by, smooth clear and cool.
🍃 taken in Montpelier, Vermont by @callenthompson

54

0

2 months ago

Spraying the finish on!

Returning to the Vermont wilds from London
2026
Pastel and oil crayon drawing on theatre scenery canvas
36" x 43"

and

the now complete wall sketch I started in March while at @vermontstudiocenter:

Desert memory, view from the car window at 85 mph
2026
Indigo dye as paint, oil crayon and pastel on cotton rag paper
22" x 30"

#landscape #painting #drawing taken in Montpelier, Vermont by @callenthompson

57

7

3 months ago

I made this homage to Varujan Boghosian while I was at the @vermontstudiocenter in March.

Varujun Boghosian's PTown Studio, 2026
Indigo dye, lime paint, acrylic, pine bough, on rice paper and wood panel
12" x 22" x 2"

Varujan was one of my role models at Dartmouth. An artist who created shrinelike reverent beauty in his work, but always with levity and wry humor to the work. He was a respected professor too, who taught at UF, Pratt, Brown, Yale, Cooper Hewitt and Dartmouth before becoming an emeritus professor at Dartmouth upon retirement. His studio space in our sculpture studio was filled with the antiques and trash find treasures he used to make his poetic compositions.

He'd peek at our work and give ad hoc praise and joyful add-on ideas as we young fledgings tried to find our creative voices. He had found his decades before in the 60s showing alongside his peers: Joseph Cornell, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, Isamu Noguchi, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg.

His friend Stanley Kunitz wrote this about him:

Chariot
for Varujan Boghosian

In this image of my friend’s studio,
where curiosity runs the shop, and you
can almost smell the nostalgic dust
settling on the junk of lost mythologies,
the artist himself stays out of view.
Yet anyone could guess
this is the magician’s place
from his collection of conical hats
and the sprawled puppets on a shelf,
the broken as well as the whole,
that have grown to resemble him,
or the other way round.
Butterflies, gameboards, and bells,
strewn jacks and alphabet blocks,
spindles, old music scores—
the litter spreads from wall to wall.
If you could dig to the bottom,
you might expect to find
a child’s plush heart,
a shing agate eye.
Here everything waits to be renewed.
That horse-age wagon wheel
proped in the corner
against an empty picture-frame,
Even in its state of disrepair,
minus three spokes,
looks poised for flight.
Tomorrow, maybe, at the crack of a whip
a flock of glittering birds will perch
on its rim, a burnished stranger
wearing an enigmatic mask
will mount its hub
and the great battered wheel
will start to spin.

#assemblage #art taken in Montpelier, Vermont by @callenthompson

71

13

5 months ago

Back in my studio, starting to play again. But miss my cohort from @vermontstudiocenter: the impromptu crits, the late night studio tawks, the writers coming to visit, the meals together, all of it!

work in progress handpainted typeface~
india ink on sandpaper

#painting #type taken in Montpelier, Vermont by @callenthompson

47

11

6 months ago

Even in winter, there is always light somewhere.
"Bright Winter, Johnson Arboretum, 49°"
24" x 14" photographs

❄️ A snow collage in honor of the power of Turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor). A wonderful decomposer of dead wood to make space in the forest, producing nutrients for new life. 🌬️

⚫ Did you know:
-Turkey tail can break down manufacturing waste from industrial dyes!
- It helps the human immune system and microbiome!
- It may even improve the efficacy of cancer treatment! Whatta gem!

Since it's so good, here are a few things I'd like turkey tail to help digest so we can start anew with their "nutrients" and use them to grow a more just and balanced world:

- MAGA dogma
- Capitalism's current uncreative, archaic, end game structure
- The dense web of criminals dressed as business leaders in the Epstein files
- Oil companies' dedication to short term profits despite long term planetary life loss
- Meta's profiteering grip on human attention
- Amazon's destruction of town Main Streets and low warehouse worker pay to fund more Bezos yachting

🍄 Feel free to add in the comments what you want turkey tail (and its mycelium) to digest next. Maybe I'll make a piece for you.

#snow #collage #sculpture #turkeytail taken in Vermont Studio Center by @callenthompson

65

10

7 months ago

Day four at @vermontstudiocenter - from clean and tidy snow collages in the morning to play play play 🪐ending with a new alphabet painted onto sandpaper with India ink at the end of the night in the delirium. What are these new sandpaper elements? Where am I going with it? I don't know. Freeing to not know, just go.

Lots of indigo dyed paper and sumi ink wood panels are drying to be ready for painting in the morning, and if this winter storm doesn't wash away all the snow, new collages want to be made tomorrow. ❄️🌬️🌞

Lotta joy.
gnight.

#residency #indigo #sumi #collage #sculpture taken in Vermont Studio Center by @callenthompson

29

1

7 months ago