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K-4 Richmond Times-Dispatch Sun., Oct. 5, 1980

Conway Thompon's Art Reflects Her Love of the Fields, Country

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reactions, seem people relate, I know the statement is universal."

Several new works have been added since that first showing, which was given last year at Longwood College. Ms. Conway admits that she wanted to hide when that show opened, but now she's glad she didn't.

"So many people will say 'Is it art?'...I've gotten so much of that I've gotten to where I don't say anything. I just smile," she said. "I had thought that people would go through and say 'Well, she's certainly let it all hang out' and then leave, but I could see them reacting.

"Besides, I'm 54 now, and I have nothing to lose. If I don't say it now, I'm going to have a lot of time left to say it."

A native of Hanover, near Gum Tree, Ms. Conway has held onto her sense of the past through a widely varied art career. She spent the decade of the '50s in New York, surrounded by the demands of the abstract expressionists through her studies at Cooper Union, but she still held on.

"People say that nature is still the source of all things, and I feel a great debt to another generation and what they represent...the simplicity and purity of their life is something I feel we need to look back at," she said "not look back at so much as something of the past but as something that we pass on."

Even in New York, she held onto that feeling. She lived on the far West Side, and when she walked home at night through Little Italy and behind New York University, she took joy in the vegetables, butter and eggs-"the fruits of the earth," she calls them-that were being unloaded.

After New York, she spent a year at the marble centers in Italy and later she toured through Mexico. And her work, she says, was formal, with no regional influences. "I was doing what people were doing," she said.

"All of it came into some part of this, some part of this statement I've tried to make," she continued. "I can't explain it, but I feel I've held onto my training in a very personal way."

Ms. Conway has remained something of a loner throughout the 10 years since her return to her native state. She taught for two years at the University of Richmond, eight years at Longwood (she no longer teaches) and she has held onto the rural roots. She has lived in Buckingham County for four years, prior to that on a farm in Cumberland.

"I'm way out now, and my neighbors are all farmers," she said. "And since I've been working on this, I think they appreciate that someone appreciates them... we speak the same language."

And after all the years of training, she feels she's found a way to translate that language into her art. It's something she feels she has been hunting for all along.

"We seem to be so confident that we have put this veneer of civilization over everything, over nature, but I have my doubts about civilization," Ms. Conway said. "I still get my best ideas watching the reflections in the pond and the shape of a tree limb."