Through the Looking Glass
With a renowned 25 year career under his belt sculpting imaginative and dreamlike characters from clay, Georgia artist Tim Taunton has returned to his first artistic love, painting.
Opening this Friday, Migration is especially proud to host an exhibition of Tim’s newest oil paintings. Through the Looking Glass will run during the month of November. Please join us at the gallery for a reception starting at 5:30pm on Friday, November 7th.
Migration has enjoyed a long history with Tim. After being introduced to his sculpture 14 years ago, Laura and I have been very proud to represent his work at Migration. In 2006, we featured his sculpture with a show titled Insights and introduced his "children" Wind Woman, War Child, Layered Bride, Mona Luna (pictured below) and others to our mid-Atlantic audience. Migration also exhibited Tim’s sculptures at the internationally famed SOFA exposition in Chicago last November where 35,000 collectors of contemporary sculptural objects were wowed by Tim’s eye catching craft of detail and depth of story telling sculptural techniques. Laura and I are now especially thrilled to exhibit Tim’s newest body of work.
Tim has a passionate and personal relationship with each of his characters and the resulting paintings. These images come directly from his dreams and colorful imagination. Tim’s skill as a painter enables you to grasp his commitment to and the authenticity of each piece of art.
Through his paintings, we now get the rare view into the imagination of the sculptor. Tim spent years sculpting with images of how each of his characters existed in relation to an imagined setting or landscape. The paintings show us what Tim experiences in his mind’s eye – a rare opportunity indeed. To accentuate this special "view," Tim crafts his own frames for each painting in the form of a window. End result: We are given a window into Tim’s psyche and his imagined worlds.
Much like his sculptures, Tim paints with extreme clarity and detail. He uses oil glaze on board. The painting is a laborious process of creating layers upon layers of color with oil paint thinned with a varnish. The process gives a heightened degree of luminosity and saturated colors unmatched by other painting methods. The extreme detail fits nicely with the atmospheric clarity found in the American west desert landscape Tim so often refers to. Atmospheric perspective is negated. What is found in the background is as clear as what is in the foreground. Depth and a distant horizon are often brought forward. However, instead of becoming a primitive flattening of the scene, the rendering suspends the images in a surreal state - dreamlike.
With this new body of work, Tim has explored the concepts of translating his sculpture into paintings. Painting has allowed him to transcend the physics of sculpture. Specifically, Tim explains his return to painting as follows:
This series of paintings have, as a common factor, the subjects or characters I have produced three dimensionally in clay over my career. Painting has allowed me to explore new narrative possibilities that are not possible in sculpture. When I first came up with the ideas for each of my sculptures, I had envisioned them set within a specific location or landscape containing relative details and associated images. Creating these paintings allowed me to address and expand the ideas behind each of my figurative pieces and to present them free and unencumbered by the constraints of materials and sculptural practicality. For these paintings, I travelled the American West to photograph various architectural and/or landscape settings for use as references.
Overall, Tim's art flows from his love of storytelling. In his own words:
I grew up listening to stories that were rich in the cultural imagery of the South, which, in retrospect, I perceived to be incredibly surreal but wonderfully believable. It is this background that both inspires my ideas and enables me to translate them into a form of figurative imagery that combines metaphorical apparitions within a literal context. In this translation, as in any translation, some things are inevitably changed, lost or added. For better or for worse, this is part of the process of storytelling. The figures in my work have become characters engaged in their own story -- spinning around an axis of personal, social and cultural idiosyncrasies. They are personal interpretations of various human attributes aimed at striking the harmonics of emotion through allegorical representations.
Tim’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in numerous public and private collections including the Yeo Joo Institute of Technology, in South Korea, The Florida Gulf Coast Art Center in Belleair, Florida, The Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, and The Mobile Museum of Contemporary Art in Mobile, Alabama. His work has also appeared in several publications, including The Penland Book of Ceramics, Ceramics Monthly Magazine, (Dec. 2002, Dec. 1998 and 1994), Ceramics Art and Perception, (June 2007 and June 2001), and 500 Figures. Taunton's work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in this country and abroad.
Tim is currently a professor of art at LaGrange University in Georgia and director of the sculpture and ceramics program there. Two years ago, Taunton had a 20 year retrospective exhibition of his work called "Telling Tales: A Personal Mythology" at the Lamar Dodd Art Center in LaGrange, Georgia. He was awarded a sabbatical to work on these paintings on exhibit. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Ceramics from Louisiana State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Ceramics and Painting from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Through the Looking Glass at Migration is the first exhibition of Tim’s new work which is a product of a sabbatical from his teaching responsibilities at LaGrange College.
(Images of paintings above include: Top, War Child; Middle, The Grand Finale; Bottom, The Bride of the Erechthion.)
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