Featured in Newton Magazine

Newton Magazine

Section: Arts Outlook

Art and Poetry on the Rocks

By Jonathan Mills Smith, February 2008

Art, hormones, poetry and fertilization all washed down with the finest single-malt scotch.

Dr. Irwin Thompson was born in Glasgow, Scotland and has lived in the Boston area since 1971 and Newton since 1986. He served as a doctor in the Vietnam War and continued on to teach medicine at Harvard. Thompson was one of three founders of Boston In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), the largest IVF clinic in the world. However, due to health problems, he retired in 1999 to live the life of an artist.

“I became physically disabled,” Thompson said. “Then I had more time to be fully immersed in the creative activities I never had time to do [when I was practicing medicine].”

Thompson’s latest project, Memories & Milestones, is a book of paintings and prose. The book features 27 poems, each accompanied by a painting. His paintings are abstract and his poetry mirrors them by being written in a free-form style. Thompson said the paintings and poems each work as inspiration for the other; sometimes the painting comes first, other times, the poem. This creates a unique artistic expression where there is interplay between words and color.

One of the main themes in Thompson’s poetry and painting is the environment. Growing up in the Scottish countryside, he gained a strong appreciation for the beauty of nature. His work is also inspired by deeply personal experiences, such as the death of his uncle, his mother’s stroke, the drowning of a best friend at age 10 and Thompson’s own illnesses and injuries.

In addition to the paintings and poems in Memories & Milestones, Thompson has produced a wide body of abstract art. His paintings contain an incredible amount of detail, where every square inch holds something unique to offer the eye. One could look at these paintings dozens of times and always find something new. “I paint so my paintings will last a hundred or a thousand years,” Thompson said.

To achieve depth in his paintings, Thompson uses multiple layers and mixed media, as well as a broad and unique palette of color. “I call myself a colorist. I like to use a combination of unusual colors,” he said. In addition to oil and acrylic paints and gels, Thompson uses anything he can get his hands on to create just the right feeling in his work. He has used homemade potpourri from his garden, Himalayan bark paper painted with a Sumi ink brush, mesh tape used to install drywall, mortar used to install tile floors and even his own X-rays.

When Thompson is not painting, writing or practicing medicine, one of his favorite hobbies is sampling Scotch whiskey. He said there are about 85 Scotch distilleries in Scotland and he has visited about 65 of them. According to Dr. Thompson, the best way to drink a single-malt scotch is in a class with a little cool water and one ice cube.