The artwork I'm going to describe to you now was created by the artist Thompson Hall in 2019. His title is ‘Living on a Bread Line’, and it was created using acrylic paint on canvas. It's 100cms wide by 70cms in height, so it's in the landscape format. So, it's roughly three foot in width and two foot in its height.

The first thing that I notice about the artwork is, it has a series of rectangles getting smaller as we reach the centre of the image. There are three dominant rectangular shapes so, each one getting slightly smaller as we move in. The first rectangle appears in the form of a zesty acidic lemon-yellow background, and the paint is applied in a very flat manner so we cannot see any brushstrokes, so it just appears to us as pure colour. The next rectangle has a hand painted black, thick black, outline around it and inside of this thick black outline, we have a very soft, floaty powdery blue colour in the background. And on top of this, we have a series of very small rectangles forming a sort of zigzag pattern, some of them pointing to the top left diagonal or bottom right diagonal, and some of them pointing the opposite way to the top right and top left. So, they kind of alternate, and they give the appearance of almost dominoes toppling or falling over, so it has a sort of slightly unstable quality to the image. And they alternate from a very soft, powdery purple, a very pastely sort of toned back purple, to that zesty acidic lemon yellow in the background of the first rectangle. So, they sort of alternate. 

Then about sort of 10cms into the painting on both sides, we get this third internal rectangle that houses most of what I describe as the action within the painting. Now this third internal rectangle, which is about 10cms from each side of the other, from the external edge of the painting, is painted in a very different way to the first two layers. So, there is lots and lots of colour: blues, greens, greys, oranges, light blues, purples laid on top of each other in splodgy brushstrokes. Sitting on top of this we have a series of square bubblegum pink faces, and the faces are reminiscent of emojis or those very early computer emoticons. So just, they have a couple of, two slants, two diagonal slants for their eyes and they alternate between having a triangle mouth with the bottom removed so, like an inverted ‘V’, and a series of triangles moving up and down on the second pink square for their mouth. So, both of these images, the one with the zigzag, mountainous shaped mouth, and the one with the just two diagonal lines pointing up mouth, both of them look like quite unhappy, grumpy, angry, very stylised, faces, quite sort of cartoon like, but almost they quite reference the world of computers and online as well. Saying that they almost look like there's an element which they look like keys on a computer keyboard as well. There's that element to them. So, they look like a face that's been made up out of symbols, like these early emoticons, that later became emojis in the world of mobile phones and communication. So, these soft pink angry faces are sitting on top of this very busy multicoloured backgrounds. And they spread all the way around the rectangle framing the central element of the piece, which is pretty much bang on in the centre of all the rectangles. 

And the central kind of motif is a square which has been turned slightly on its side, so that we have one of the corners pointing up and one of the corners pointing down so it's almost a diamond, but it's in a square shape. This is painted inside this squared shape. In this diamond position square shape, we have, it's a very sort of slightly warm, soft blue, almost like the sea on a particularly warm day in summer like the Caribbean. And on top of this we have a further rectangle, which I didn't even realise was a rectangle at the beginning when I was describing, which has some writing on the top and there's a thick green band across the top of this rectangle, and the words ‘Food Bank’ are written-on top of it. We then have some more of these multicoloured splodges of paint, which are kind of positioned so they're moving at a sort of diagonal to the top left corner of the painting. And then this is all outlined in bold black paint, with a very simple door drawn on the centre of the Food Bank. 

Underneath this blue square, positioned as a diamond with this green headed Food Bank in the centre of the painting, we have another section of text, which runs like a ‘V’ shape, moving, framing the bottom of this blue square that's positioned in a diamond motif. And so it runs from just over halfway up the painting to sort of three quarters of the way down, so it's sitting in this rectangle with the pink angry faces and a multicoloured background. So, it runs all the way down to the bottom of that and then moves up to the right-hand side on a diagonal. And the words follow the shape of these lines sitting within this kind of ‘V’ shape. The background is painted a sort of pastel turquoise colour. So, a lot of the colours used in the painting are quite pleasing to the eye and not too sort of aggressive as it were. 

But this is complemented or contrasted by these many coloured splodges behind these pink faces, and the many coloured splodges on the food bank in the centre, and the writing that reads on this turquoise ‘V’ shaped underneath the food bank motif set in this square diamond shape – it says in thick black writing, all capitals, as it says ‘LIVING ON A BREADLINE’. The words living on are on the left-hand side of the ‘V’ and the ‘a’ word is right at the bottom of the ‘V’ right in the middle. And then the word breadline moves up the righthand side of the ‘V’, so it follows and moves around at an angle.

The style of the painting is quite playful, but then there is this sort of slightly mischievous darker undertone to it. So, there is almost a sense of humour in it, but then a very serious point is being made.

And this particular body of work that Thompson has created focuses on social and political issues, exploring the themes of inequality, and marginalisation, but I think particularly during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Thompson has been working with organisation ActionSpace for many years and creates a variety of work. He's a very prolific artist, in a huge variety of work in very contrasting styles. And this piece for me is reminiscent of a map, but also a flag because everything is pushed up to the front of the picture plane, so there's no kind of realistic perspective within the artwork. So, it's a very bold, colourful, playful, yet very serious statement.