Mac Thigpen

Artist

Mac Thigpen makes his home in the high desert mountains of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. “I paint because I love to paint. In this phase of my life, I am able to make art my full-time vocation. I am in a new place in my expression of my art - freer, expressive, alive, with a sense of longing.”

When he was first learning to paint, Mac Thigpen was told to leave landscapes to retirees. “If you can paint the human figure well, you can paint anything,” his art teachers said, and for many years Mac was emotionally invested in painting the human figure.

But now Thigpen is retired and he paints whatever he wants.

“I still feel drawn to the human figure, but lately I’m moved by landscapes, pathways, mountains, sky, water, earth,” the San Miguel resident says. “Not to create a photographic image but to convey emotion, connection, longing.”

Thigpen’s works — landscapes, cityscapes and the human figure — will be exhibited for the first time in Mexico during the months of May and June 2019 at the James Harvey Gallery at Fabrica la Aurora.

“I feel free in my third age, or tercera edad, to explore, to make mistakes, to be surprised,” he says. “There is no time to worry about perfection; only to be bold, to experiment, to see what emerges. At times, I feel like a kid!”

Thigpen grew up in a small, strict, middle-class Southern Baptist home in the Deep South. “There wasn’t much room to simply be, rather just be what you are told,” he says. But he was always looking for someway to express his creative side.

It was at junior college when he was able to formally study art, and when he got the advice about landscapes. It pushed his understanding of the human figure and the use of color to new heights.

But as Thigpen’s father saw it: “You’re good but you can’t make a living at it.” Thus began a vocational career as an Episcopal Priest, taking him to Manhattan, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

“I loved the work,” Thigpen say. “For me it was about hope and healing for people’s lives, being present with people, being about the work of justice, compassion, and integrity for all people. And it didn’t feel disconnected with my art, my creative side.”

Yet, he wouldn’t paint again until he came out as a gay man in his early thirties and “finding freedom to express myself in new ways I never thought possible.”

In 2008, Thigpen received a Lilly Sabbatical Grant, which first brought him to San Miguel.

“Over my sabbatical, I thought about how being connected to the creative, life-giving part of the imago-dei, is not just limited to the arts,” he says. “Being creative is much wider than that; it involves all of us and how we live our lives, how we go about our busyness, our relationships, our family and friends, our world and our own well-being. Being creative is being life-givers, full of hope and promise, seeing possibilities where all seems chaotic or impossible, breathing life into that which seems lifeless, helping to make all things new. How will we use it?”

Hope and promise is abundant in Thigpen’s use of light, color and shadow on oil on canvas in subjects as diverse as cool mornings at Charco del Ingenio and raucous nights at Hank’s on Taco Tuesday.

“I paint what I see and experience, something that gives me joy or makes me wonder or connects with deep longing in my soul. My canvases are my poetry; and my painting is a search to express the ache and longing of beauty and being human that I see and experience around me.”