TIMOTHY BARNES

Walk Tall and Alway Carry a Lightbulb


„I am trying to rid myself of the concrete….Life is so absurd and very abstract, once you step aside of the daily routine.
That is what I am trying to convey: the absurdity of life.“
Timothy’s artistic development arises from his uprooting as someone who grew up in two worlds. In no world at home he has become a searcher.
In his early days as a photographer, he deliberately refrained from depicting people in order to create something other-worldly and deprive what he saw from function and thus a meaning. Through this rapture he created a feeling of emptiness. He transferred this constant act of searching on to his observed environment and asked in return about its existence.

Now sometime later, Timothy has turned to painting in order to deconstruct his former concrete depiction of reality into further abstraction.
At first glance Timothys paintings seem crude: irregular lines, childish repetitive pencil marks, paint looking like stains, blotches, fingerprints, spots, scratches.
But such is life. His paintings reflect his views on life. „Life is not a glossy magazine, things are raw, we grow old, and get wrinkles; things get dirty not clean.“
As children we all start with a squiggle and those squiggles have a meaning to us. At first that squiggle is just that uncoordinated mark on any surface. As we grow older our perception changes squiggles are no longer accepted. We learn how to copy the world as we see it. What once was an unidentified mark has now become a house, tree or person. Timothy is taking a step back again. A tree for instance exists of many different lines and marks, take one out of context and it is no longer a tree. By singling out these lines and marks, he takes them out of their context.

Timothy works with oil colour, spray paint, gesso, linseed oil, oil stick, pastel, varnish, he even uses masking tape. He minimises, reduces, singles out. Examining the texture of his materials, he takes them apart, deconstructs only to place them (separately) back onto his canvas into an interactive meaningless jumble. Through this process he is trying to create new purpose for them.