For nearly twenty years, Thompson has focused primarily on painting old neon signs that have somehow avoided the wrecking ball - the signs that have lived and beat the odds. These sculptural signs exist as historically and emotionally charged metaphors for the unrelenting passage of time. In his paintings, Thompson seeks to reveal the hidden beauty of these banal, rusty relics by rendering them in paint.

Thompson finds his subjects while exploring the forgotten back streets of cities across the United States. This act of discovery coupled with being in the physical presence of these signs, is crucial to his process. Thompson is searching for the diamonds in the discarded materials of our heavily commercial culture - the hidden beauty in the mundane and often-overlooked.