Marianne Thompson is gaining international recognition as a dynamic and versatile artist.  She has work hanging across Canada and the U.S., most notably at Notre Dame University in South Bend, IN; the Episcopal Church Center (CUAC offices) in New York City, New York;  St. Mary's Church in Hull, Massachusetts, and Anglican Summer Camps in Kenora, Ontario. She has won awards both for her painting and carving, and exhibits work in group shows about once a year.  Currently she is showing work at and has created paintings for the Washington Shakespeare Company's production of "Lulu," at the Clark Street Playhouse in Arlington, Virginia (Nov. 17 - December 13, 2009).  She has also written and illustrated a book for children which is pending publication.

Born in 1976 in Montreal, Marianne began painting at age one and a half, when, lacking proper art materials, she experimented with the earth-tones to be found in her diaper and painted the walls around her crib.  Unlike other artists of her generation, this was a phase she soon outgrew.  Her mother, after the initial shock of observing and having to clean up after her daughter's expressive spirit, quickly invested in paints.

Painting was a favorite pastime that endured through her childhood.  At age 12 she began attending John Smith's School of Art, in Toronto, Ontario.  Under the guidance of this excellent teacher, she developed her technical skill, and honed her expressive abilities.  Color has always been a delight of Marianne's, and she has often expressed regret that health foods do not come in nice colours like candy; if they did, she says, she would be so much more interested in eating them.

Marianne continued with Mr. Smith until the end of her high school career.  She won the "Grace Halaz Art Award" at her alma mater, Victoria Park Secondary School; and went to the U.S. to St. John's College (www.sjca.edu).

These were very rich years for Marianne; both highly challenging and highly fulfilling.  It was during these years of tension and growth that Marianne began picking up sticks and logs, smuggling them into her dorm room, and carving them.  Although the self-taught nature of her work resulted in a great loss of blood, she managed to retain her limbs and developed her ability and ambition until the day of her senior year when she claimed a four by three foot recently felled tree stump and bought herself a chainsaw.

This, too, she survived, though the tension in her life at that point was so great that the chainsaw seemed too easy, and instead she chose to hammer away at the stump with chisel and mallet.  Her carving, which was of Abraham and Isaac, was not finished by the time she graduated, but it was shown in the school and community art exhibit.  Upon graduation of University, in addition to a double Major in Philosophy and the History of Science and Mathematics, double minor in Classics and Comparative Lit., she again won the graduating class art award, "The Charles Vernon Moran Memorial."  Her senior essay, which is essentially a small thesis, was an argument half written and half painted, on Plato's Republic, in defense of Images.

The intervening years, which between then and now, are ten; consist largely in a battle between what she would like to be doing, what she is afraid of doing, what she is good at doing; and what she can live by doing.  She picked up stone carving.  She painted.  She has been through varied occupations, settling on teaching Special Education, although her teaching certification is in Science.  She has had one solo show, "Drawn Toward Being" in 2002 at Malden Public Library in Massachusetts, and has had work in several other shows throughout the years. She has a steady number of commissions and has achieved, to date, a happy balance of both kinds of work that she loves; teaching and painting.