Martin Thompson is a New Zealand artist. A self-taught artist, Thompson has gained fame in the world of outsider art for his grid-like drawings, created from plane fractals. A mathematical savant, Thompson calculates the formula needed for each artwork, creating images in which repeated patterns overlay at decreasing sizes and scales, much in the way of a Sierpinski carpet. Describing himself as "an old hippie", and with self-diagnosed Asperger syndrome, Thompson lives reclusively; his gifts in mathematics are balanced by difficulty to operate easily within social settings. He spends much of his time obsessively working on his art, in a seeming attempt to create order from the chaos of the universe. Rather than working in a studio, much of his work is created while sitting at the tables of local cafés, originally in his native Wellington, but more recently in the city of Dunedin, where Thompson moved in 2007. Thompson began his drawing career in 1980. Originally created using commercial A3 and A4 graph paper, hand-coloured in fine art pens, he has now expanded to include much larger works and - since about 2016, coloured papers. Thompson is extremely particular about the pens which he uses and the colours which they produce. Thompson's technique not only includes the hand-marking of grids, but the deliberate physical cutting and pasting of areas of grid from one part of his works to another. Each finished work is created in two halves, a "positive" and a "negative" image of the mathematical formula which Thompson has used, and as such all of his works have a two-by-one ratio in size. In 2002, Thompson met with curator Brooke Anderson, who featured his work in a 2005 exhibition, "Obsessive Drawings", at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. This led to Thompson's work becoming known outside New Zealand for the first time, and he has since built up a small but significant international following. Within New Zealand, Thompson has had numerous shows at City Gallery Wellington and Brett McDowell Gallery, and in 2015 he was the subject of a one-man show, "Sublime Worlds", at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Outside New Zealand, Thompson's art has been shown at New York's Ricco Maresca Gallery.
