Trent Thigpen earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. His art training also includes sculpture, digital media, and ceramics. He has a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies degree from the University of Houston-Victoria with concentrations in bioinformatics, computer science and communications. His interdisciplinary background includes six years working with emotionally disturbed children and adolescents. Trent’s art explores the intersection of art perception, psychology, information, and culture.
Statement
Growing up and living on the Texas Gulf Coast, my relationship with the environment is a source of wonder, contradiction, and conflict. My identity as a naturalist was heavily shaped by birdwatching, camping, hiking, and fishing. I learned about the world and found solace by observing animal behavior and exploring nature. I also remember washing tar from my feet at beaches littered with plastic and witnessing a colossal fireball from a refinery explosion. The oil, gas, and plastics industry that supported my family, my wife’s family, and most of our aunts, uncles, and cousins also caused illness, death, ecological destruction, war, and political turmoil.
My recent work explores the cognitive dissonance and anxiety created by conflicting needs, desires, and environmental consequences. I combine the emotions of remembered childhood trauma and family turmoil with the current existential and environmental fears shared by many people. I paint from news footage of actual petroleum and refinery fires including those in Texas City, Deer Park, Port Aransas, and the Gulf of Mexico. Combining this real energy and turmoil with imagery from found photographs and 35 mm slides of family road trips, special events, vacations and everyday life, the paintings represent points of mental conflict where someone could either react with defense mechanisms, make changes in thinking, or take actions.
Much as the Surrealists used the psychology of dreams and the collective unconscious, I use contemporary psychological theories of perception, trauma resolution, and personality development to guide my art. The paintings are models of my emotions and thinking where the interaction of the personal and the cultural can be visualized. Viewing anxiety and despair as a catalyst for positive change instead of mental illness contributes to the collective empowerment needed to overcome personal fears, sociopolitical injustice, and environmental existential threats such as climate change. The paintings provoke questions and may reveal insight about the way in which we react to and reconcile mental contradictions between the way things are and the way they could be.
Through art I consolidate many ideas into one experience and attempt to make multiple levels of meaning available through materials, metaphor, and symbolism.