Chiaroscuro. You’ll hear that word a lot if you talk to Bob Tompkins about his artwork. The word refers to bold contrast between light and shadow in painting but could just as easily refer to the contrast between the dark 5000 square foot studio and the pools of laughter that radiate from his students.
The art of Bob Tompkins is more than just the paint on canvas. The art of Bob Tompkins is the dedicated community of 60-plus who weekly gather to learn from the master painter, enjoy some of his cooking, and spend plenty of energy laughing and cutting-up.
For 19 years, Tompkins has called Lone Wolf Drive in Madison home to his studio, his gallery, his home, and his community. His students not only call him their teacher, they call him their friend.
“This is cheaper than a psychiatrist,” joked Terre Harris after a string of laugh lines passed back and forth between her and Tompkins. Harris has spent 14 years as a student of Tompkins and is part of the regular Tuesday night class.
“Teaching is part of my Christian testimony,” Tompkins said.
Each of Tompkins students participates in a once-weekly class but has access to their studio 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A combination code on the outside door gives students access to the custom-built warehouse in which row after row of easels give them an individualized work space.
“Everybody gets their own five feet of space,” Tompkins said.
That space includes an area to set up a still life, a dedicated light source, easel and palate.
Since 1993 Tompkins has built this adult community in Madison, but before that, he spent his entire career teaching children, mostly in public schools.
Born in 1943 in the Mississippi Delta, Tompkins attended Greenville Public School before attending Delta State University and earning both a Bachelor and Master’s Degree in Art Education. He graduated in December 1965 at the height of the Vietnam war. There were few jobs available for teachers mid-year so, like many men at the time, Tompkins was prepared to ship off to serve. He even traveled to Millington, TN, to qualify as a navigator through the Navy’s OTS.
Destiny would send him a different route.
Tompkins stopped by his alma mater for a visit that January. The lights were out and most of campus was still on a break, but his faculty fraternity advisor was still in the administration building. He offered Tompkins a job teaching school in Jacksonville, FL, starting mid-year. Instead of shipping out to Vietnam, Tompkins received a teaching deferment and shipped out to teach junior high school.
“It was no coincidence, God was leading me to right where I needed to be,” Tompkins said.
While at Delta State, Tompkins had learned a great deal about how to teach art but had not developed much as an artist himself. That was about to change.
“Delta State was good for teaching, but it wasn’t very strong in the arts,” Tompkins said. “We only had one teacher in the department when I started. Then we got a second one, but they were a potter. When I graduated I’d never really painted.”
Providence placed him in Florida teaching at the same school as social studies teacher Courtenay Hunte, himself a practicing oil painter who was training under the renowned artist Cleve Miller. Both became artistic mentors to Tompkins and proceeded to teach the teacher.
While working alongside Hunte and Miller, Tompkins painted his first real painting – a portrait of a woman which still hangs in his studio today.
“I had a fiancé still at Delta State but wasn’t married at the time so I spent all my time painting,” Tompkins said. Miller’s Baroque style of painting quickly influenced Tompkins and led him to imitate painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer as he searched for his own style.
“Nothing excites me more than to contrast a light area against that of a dark area,” he said. “This contrast causes the drama that we see in everyday life.”
There’s that word Chiaroscuro again. Tompkins loves that word.
While Miller and Hunte served as mentors, he attended workshops in New York and other places under great American painters such as Robert Brackman and learned the dynamics of shape and value to help craft compelling images. Brackman was part of the renowned Ashcan School Movement and painted official portraits of such notable Americans as John D. Rockefeller and Charles Lindbergh. The bright lights and dark shadows in his work moved Tompkins in a visceral way, but the gritty urban style normally associated with the Aschan School was not as moving to him. Instead he applied those techniques to his own sense of place. Soon, themes started to emerge from Tompkins work that showed a certain taste – one that was definable by the phrase “Mississippi Delta Boy.”
An avid hunter since childhood, Tompkins paintings hearkened back to the Delta with images of hound dogs and water fowl and looked like a window into the outdoors life.
“I can, but I don’t like to paint flowers,” he said.
He has said that phrase a lot. Enough that it has made it onto a wall of humorous “Bob Tompkins Truisms” posted and updated by his students.
Another fitting truism: “Before you try to paint ducks, go shoot one and study it’s anatomy.”
Hunting and painting have gone hand-in-hand throughout Tompkins career and duck painting would eventually become a hallmark for Tompkins, but first he would have to move back to Mississippi.
“I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” Tompkins said. We can hunt from September to May and the rest of the time we can fish.”
After his brief time in Florida and marrying his Delta State fiancé, Tompkins and his wife would move back to Greenville to teach in the same public schools he had once attended.
Tompkins own art began to gain acclaim just as his teaching did. In 1980 and 1988 he won the prestigious Mississippi Duck Stamp Award and his career began to fly.
“It was a huge deal back then,” he said.
Not only did the award mean that his artwork would be featured on the acclaimed Duck Stamp, he was given 500 original prints which sold out immediately.
“I made $45,000 off those prints,” he said. “That was a lot of money to some ‘Poor White Trash’ teacher from the Delta. My first year teaching I only made $4,100.”
Awards and opportunities to publish his work came quickly and in 1993, changes in his personal life felt him lead to relocate to Jackson, MS where he began teaching in Jackson Public Schools and growing his own art studio in the Millsaps Art District. In 2000 he would retire from Jackson Public Schools and transition his renown as both an artist and a teacher into a private studio setting.
“I searched for a year and a half for the land,” he said.
The building came when a friend in Greenville who dealt in metal buildings had to foreclose on one and offered it to Tompkins at a greatly reduced rate. With the help of friends, Tompkins custom built the studio space for students and has remained booked ever since.
“I advertised classes and studio space and had 72 people wanting to take lessons and 80 on a waiting list,” he said.
Since 2000, Tompkins’ Studio has never had less than 50 students and has launched the professional careers of 100s of professional and semi-professional artist in the Jackson metro area.
“I’m more proud of that than I am of my painting,” he said.
Through the combination of Old Master painting techniques and community development, Tompkins has given many people new careers and new purposes in life. In addition to his own style, Tompkins brings in regular guest artist to teach master classes and cooks for everyone who attends.
“I’m a big cook,” he said. “I made a peach cobbler for everyone last night and brought it to class to share. And I make the best cornbread in the world.”
As Tompkins described his event menus he showed as much excitement as he does when he talks about his paintings. What drives the excitement about the food is the relationships that it fosters and the chance to serve people. The same things that drive his love for teaching.
In addition to studio space, Tompkins has built himself an additional 1800 square feet of gallery and a living area all within the same plot of land on Lone Wolf Drive. As the area around him has built up, Tompkins has been excited to see the city grow and his studio’s reach increase. But he still keeps a plot of hunting land North of Canton, never losing his Delta boy roots.
