Timothy King: In Air Landscapes
Timothy King’s most recent show, In Air Landscapes, consists of paintings and pastels from the past five years, done on site and in the studio. The show combines multiple bodies of work, which provides us with an interesting opportunity to encounter the landscape in terms of juxtapositions: the landscape as nature, the landscape as abstraction, and the landscape as a place where humans live.
Landscape as nature versus landscape as abstraction
King’s pastels are a deep engagement with nature. His response to the light that passes through the trees, the complexity of intersecting paths, grassy regions, vertical trunks, and branches, is a dynamic interplay between light/dark, line, and shape. His mark making is unabashedly direct, with bold black lines, swishy shapes made with the side of the chalk, and fuzzy smears, which function to create the push and pull that interrupts the near-far of space and, instead, prioritize the dynamic dance of shape and light.
It is this push and pull between clarity and fuzz, where hard shapes that at once switch from trunk-of-tree to geometric form. These drawings fluctuate between precision, through color and drawing–and dynamic motion, through his command of the gestural mark, which is what makes his pastels just so…true.
Tyler Creek, Wing Park, pastel on board 16x20 inches, 2012
Bringing these drawings into the studio, he uses them to construct larger paintings. The degrees of separation from the actual place in nature increase, and different choices are made. Colors are much more muted in his paintings, and the landscape is reconstructed differently. Shapes develop harder edges, and where there was once fuzzy smears of foliage, there are now interlocking blocks, like puzzle pieces that unite generalized natural forms. With this, he continues to push and pull the space as he does in the pastels, though with more cubist tendencies. In fact, these harder forms contribute to a sense of dissipation–a departure from its original perceptual foundation into a more abstract, more essential representation of the place, similar to Cezanne, but also similar to Ruth Miller’s landscapes.
Tyler Creek, Wing Park, oil on canvas, 42x54 inches, 2023
Landscape as a place where humans live
The landscape painter who is focused on the natural world might think of their subject matter as natural light and natural forms of the world, or the electric lights and the manmade angles of the city. But for those unoccupied scenes, well…where are the people? Do we really think that the landscape painter is always alone out there, without a single soul with whom to cohabitate, just because no figures are in their paintings? The keepers of these places where we exist–the landscapers, custodians, doormen, security guards–their job is to know, to care for, and to maintain the space. Integral to their work, they witness. A couple walking hand in hand. An argument between two colleagues. A person noticing moments too late that they’ve just been pickpocketed. A marriage proposal. In his hours and hours of painting en plein air, Tim King also witnesses, and these works incorporate his memories of events that took place in the locations he most often paints. He writes, “They all came out of older studies started up to 25 years ago. All are from experiences while painting landscapes in plein air where I witnessed actions, events and lifestyles that have been stuck dwelling in my head.” A guy fishing, a homeless man, a lifeguard saving a drowning boy, and many other events are things that he has witnessed while he’s been out on site, painting the landscape.
Twenty five years of events witnessed in his usual stomping grounds, to be exact. An homage to Seurat’s Le Grand Jette, Gone Fishing incorporates several of these memories. Caught in mid-motion, these shadow-figures are painted as memories of past events set in the present place.
Gone Fishing, oil on canvas, 62x50 inches, 2024
Similarly, Joy Ride Redemption utilizes the same metaphorical use of color, though the figures that are further off into the distance seem to partake in the same color palette as the brilliantly painted sky.
Joy Ride Redemption, oil on canvas, 50x62 inches
Tim writes, “I’m consumed by my dream of the pure landscape. My compositions, unpopulated, missing people moving about while I paint the trees and passages. I am into the abstractions, shapes, forms, color and space. But lately, I’m moving more confidently into narrative that I secretly experimented on for 20 years. Until recently I was not to sure about narrative. This exhibition is for me a new beginning into storytelling populated in the people in my world, at last.”
As exhilarating as his work clearly is to me, I find his decision to share the start of a new inquiry even more exciting. I am looking forward to seeing this show in person, which is on view from October 1 through October 26.
-Eileen Mooney.
