ARTIST STATEMENT and BIOGRAPHY

STATEMENT

I find painting goes beyond the notion that painted reality is “nothing but “ a precursor to a photographic realism. Painting is a phenomenological experiment. There is a synthesis between the visual and the kinesthetic that forms a powerful third range of human perception. Human space and form are not purely optical manifestations. The painting of mass and line can provoke a muscle sense, a physical ness between viewer and the painted relationships. Hans Hoffman called this “Push-Pull”. Matisse referred to this as the convexity of pictorial space. In this “meta-vision” or “minds-eye” the painter is not freed from the experience of perspective and local color and the naturalistic geometry of the objects and scenes. Rather, the painter can be liberated by the experience and knowledge of the defining aspects of human reality.

Vision encompasses the obvious factors of sight along with other less obvious paths to sensing reality. Human vision is based on a plasticity of structures that tell us more than what a photograph can convey. The visual system, governed by layers of logical relationships, goes much further than a photo interpretation of reality. Painters like Courbet and Cézanne understood these logical relationships as they rejected the establishment of a new French academic painting style that had begun to incorporate a photo-centric aesthetic. We see in these revolutionary painters an understanding of classical painting where the reality or meta-reality of a long tradition is almost lost. This tadition, carried on by Matisse and Picasso, ripe with cubistic and anamorphic distortion is often lost on modern audiences who have become unintentionally confused and miss lead. We have begun to think painting can be based on unskilled postmodern rejections of the past because the rules were abolished. Anything but that is true. There are still the universal and particular realities of human perception to be considered in painting. It is this timeless quality of painting based on a tradition of painters study of human vision needs to be continually renewed with each generation of painters.

We need to try to regain the hidden logic of realism once more. This logic, one discovers, is a metaphor for the recursive boundary between painter and the subject. The more intuited convexity and physicality hold a stark contrast to our contemporary photo centric, cropped off and flat boxy world-view. In a painting there can be kinesthesia not found in photos. Painting can be about the stereoscopic compressions, the peripheral spatial expansions, the anamorphic distortions and the hidden structures that to an observer incase those aspects integral with human feeling. I recommend young painters paint from that internal sense of a meta-reality the total visual system provides.


BIOGRAPHY: Timothy J. King

March 2007
E d u c a t i o n

MFA-Master of Fine Arts– Painting & Drawing–2006, Northern Illinois University

MA-Master of Arts– Painting 1985, The University of Tulsa

BFA-Bachelor of Fine Arts– Painting 1981, Kansas City Art Institute

Foundations Studies– 1975-1976, Columbus Collage of Art & Design

T e a c h i n g

Loyola University Chicago. 2006 -
Current— Adjunct Professor of Art.

Illinois Institute of Art, Schaumburg. 2006 -
Current — Adjunct Instructor of Art.

Northern Illinois University. 2004 - 2007
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art.

Henderson State University, Arkansas. 1990 - 1991—
Adjunct Professor of Art.

The University of Tulsa. 1982 — 1983 Teaching Assistant in Painting, printmaking and Instructor of Record of drawing,

I have been a landscape and figurative painter for nearly 30 years. I have been living in Chicago and Elgin since 1992. I was born in Baltimore but I grew up in Lawton and then Tulsa, Oklahoma. I attended art school in Columbus, Ohio for my first year (Columbus College of Art & Design). On good advise from my painting teacher (Mr. Fullum) at CCAD I transferred to study painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976.

CCAD was an excellent school to study foundations. It was more modernist conceptually and visually and less postmodernist than KCAI’s foundations program. CCAD had an excellent 2-D/3-D/color-design foundation. It also had a great Structural Drawing and Anatomy drawing foundation. At CCAD the foundations assignments were designed to be problematic and a bit confusing in wording. It forced students to collaborate and share concepts so solutions could be obtained. It certainly was one way to achieve a social problem solving experience. It was never made clear that this was legal and we often felt like we were cheating, like we were plagiarizing one another. That was a negative but the collaborative experience I found was one of the best preparations I have ever had for the work world. At CCAD I had one foundations drawing and painting teacher that gave me my first real introduction to conceptualizing drawing as simile and as interspatial form. I now call this the Dynamic Rock Structure Problem. It is still one of the best drawing lessons I have ever had.

As it turned out foundations at CCAD actually complemented my studies in KCAI’s strong observational painting program. For many decades KCAI had been well known as one of the best figurative painting schools in the nation. Soon I was painting and studying with Lester Goldman, Wilbur Niewald and Stanley Lewis. It was clear this was a magical time to be at KCAI. From this faculty at KCAI I learned many great lessons in drawing, painting and color.

In Lester Goldman’s studio I copied Tintereto and for the first time sensed the formal structure of great painting. Lester taught me many observations about the old masters relating to painterly form, drama and light. I remember an important drawing lesson from Lester in which he helped me conceive the model initially as a silhouette. I was to draw all body parts reversed as if drawing from the other side from which I couldn’t really see. This forced me to project relationships from my intuitive memory of complex structures off the models silhouette. The result was a sense of dimensionality and structure that I had never grasped before. This was a key beginning to the way I have experienced space and form ever since.

While in Wilbur Niewald’s studio, I adopted a vision that was unique to his students. And more importantly, Wilbur gave me my holistic painterly philosophy. From his teachings came my strong sense of nature and the relationship of vision to nature. Color shape became the problem for me when painting while outline began to diminish as my vehicle to drawing in paint. I was learning to see the shapes that enveloped objects. At a later lesson I began to see that light was now my real guide. I remember Wilbur keying up the color of my painting to a higher level with one brush stroke of strong red on the face of the model in my painting. Before that moment I didn’t see that color in the model. It is a lesson I always try to follow.

While studying with Stanley Lewis I was shown what I call the “Painter’s Form.” It is another term for interspatial figure-ground shift from perceptual experience. He showed me through the observation of the great Dutch Masters still life and landscape pictures, concepts about the old masters that made me realize how to draw for myself the forms I had experienced in copying those paintings. It became apparent these pictures interwove perceptual realism and plastic abstraction. Stanley was showing me the paradoxical and fringe aspects of the multi layered human visual system and how to transfer that system to painting. Ever since this lesson the structure and form of my painting has become ever more a holistic, conceptually connected to the universal and insightful of classical forming traditions in painting.

I am forever grateful for the profound and overlapping painting and drawing lessons, advanced artistic meanings and a vision of a human scale to beauty, all gained from Goldman, Niewald and Lewis. It was, for me, the key factor in my advancement that I studied with three masters rather than with only one.

Even before leaving KCAI I adopted another couple of mentors. One, Nathaniel (Tan) Larrabee, at first indirectly and later directly, led me to a great deal of thinking about painting and art. My older brother Walter who had always been my mentor on all levels of growing up and in the study of art is still my closest confidant. Nathaniel Larrabee was the painter my brother Walter studied with at CCAD. Later the two became colleagues after Walter began teaching Illustration there. Through all the years Walter and I were sharing art school experiences, (He entered study at CCAD the year I transferred to KCAI), Walter included for me the ideas and lessons Larrabee was teaching him. Even today I gain new tidbits from Walter’s memories of his lessons with Tan. Directly I enjoy discussions with Tan now. Eventually my brother’s friendship with Tan became my own. Interestingly, in many ways, my own painting is closer to Tan’s than is Walters. In matters of Art and painting, I find it is in our differences between Walter and myself that we often are able to discover the most about painting and art.

After graduation from KCAI in 1981, I pursued my Masters degree in my hometown at the University of Tulsa. I was a graduate TA for two years, which included teaching a Drawing 100 level class. I also did assistantship work in painting studio and printmaking studio. I took my time to paint and research an important discovery for me; that the binocular visual system can be imaged in a structural aspect of holistic pictorial space. Since I thought this was an original contribution that I could make to my own way of painting I decided to write a Masters Thesis on the subject, which took an additional two years beyond the core program. I published the thesis and graduated in 1985 with an MA in painting. I have since built on these ideas and continue to study and paint based on the principles and axiom I learned and invented for the thesis.

This same year I graduated with my MA I married my wife Elizabeth and started a video production and graphic design career at the American Airlines Maintenance Training Base. After 4 years at American we transferred with Elizabeth’s company to Little Rock Arkansas. Here I worked for the State of Arkansas as a graphic designer and animator for 4 years. While there I taught two semesters of design at Henderson State University.

We moved to Chicago in 1994 and then Elgin two years later. I spent 6 years in the Chicago area as a designer and art director working in corporate marketing first as an animation producer and then as a print art director. I then moved into the field of direct marketing and finally over to business-to-business advertising. The last 5 years I have worked as a freelance art director. I currently design only part time while the rest of my time (before entering NIU’s MFA program) is spent painting and promoting my painting career. I am a co-founder of the Midwest Paint Group. This group consists of six painters, five of whom studied within five years of each other at KCAI. We are all concerned with similar figurative interspatial painting issues. I am the designer and web master for the group’s Internet gallery and group site (mpg-gallery.org). I recently designed and built my current studio behind my house. Elizabeth and I have two children, Mitchell nearly 3 and Helen 7. We live in a vintage community and own a 1929 Tutor style home with an Arts and crafts interior. This is our second vintage home restoration project.