R.E.C. Chipper Thompson was born and raised in Athens, Alabama,  a rural cotton and soybean farming community, but only thirty miles from the high-tech enclave of Huntsville, Alabama.  Thompson grew up surround by both Southern pastoralism and the most modern of cutting-edge scientific developments.  He drew and wrote stories from an early age and studied journalism in college.

Thompson’s first professional art was music. He is proficient on guitar, mandolin, bass, bouzouki, and various hand-drums.  He has written and performed hundreds of original songs for over twenty years and recorded 5 CDs of music since 1997.  Thompson is also the author of “Homefields: The Art of Lanford Monroe” which is available in the Gerald Peters Gallery Bookstore.

Thompson has made the high desert town of Taos, New Mexico his home for over twenty five years.

I am fascinated by the yearning for knowledge, from ancient flat-earth ponderings to the most modern quantum theory, and I see the Documents series as an extended, open-ended meditation on the depths of human knowledge.  I am particularly fascinated by how old maps – a major influence on the Documents – show the world not only how it might be but how we’d like it to be.  My Documents are also influenced by sources as diverse yet intertwined as illuminated manuscripts and circuit board designs; the gold foil on spacecraft; the red wax seals of Papal Bulls and the rubber stamps on endless mountains of bureaucratic paperwork.  With their enigmatic scripts and odd diagrams, it’s tempting to ask: What do the mean?” and I reply: “I wonder?!”  – R.E.C. Thompson