Timothy King (Illinois) curriculum vitae
“My work connects to past great traditions of painting while satisfying my urgent sense of modernity, my love of natural forms and my aesthetic joy in perception. All my work represents an intimacy and pathos in regard to my contemporary aesthetic to nature, humanity and art. My landscapes are motivated from my search for the sublime, the preservation of painting’s perceptual origins and the message of environmentalism. Somehow I see these artistic causes in parallel dimensions. I share the passions of Corot and Constable for nature and art. However, I view art and nature from a dire ecological consciousness. In addition to landscape, when I paint the heroic monumentality of the figure it becomes a symbol of human nature with the best and worst of our intentions veiled within. My still life paintings have intended juxtapositions of the natural and the manufactured to encompass life’s material and cultural joy and tragedy. I work these compositions out of a painterly poetic, building and destroying as I renew my vision without postmodernist overstatements or gimmicks. I’m driven by the unpredictability of painting’s visual momentum and emotional crossovers. My style comes out of the historical desire to establish structural and poetic spaces as well as the modern need to balance this with how the world feels today." |
Timothy King is an “en plein air” painter in the tradition of on site painting through direct observation. His pastel drawings and oil paintings of the city of Chicago and surrounding midwest landscape exude the sense of a modernism explored by Cezanne in the 19th Century. He has the special ability to discover the essence of the landscape. He finds depth of space from foreground to background by the nature of the light. Through the complex usage of the compositional elements of diagonals intersecting verticals and horizontals, he creates what appears to be a simplicity in the landscape.
Tim grew up in Oklahoma. By the first grade, he was showing promise by the way he could draw naturalistically. From that point, his art education was nurtured and he eventually attended the Columbus College of Art and Design. Later transferring to the Kansas City Art Institute where he studied with Lester Goldman, Wilbur Niewald and Stanley Lewis, he earned a BFA in 1981. At the University of Tulsa, he received an MA and later he completed a MFA at Northern Illinois University, Dekalb. King’s work has been exhibited in Chicago, locally and nationally, notably in New York at the Bowery Gallery, as well as at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, MO. He is a founding member of the Midwest Paint Group. His work is in the collection of the Sheldon Swope Museum of Art in Terra Haute, IN. |
