Timothy Linn:
Timothy Linn was is one of the very first artists, whose artwork i remember seeing in person. It’s funny because he stuff was always sprinkled around our house and i just never really took notice to it because it was so commonplace.
But when i was a little bit older, i was coming home from high school one day and i stopped and was like, oh…oh wow what the hell thats fantastic. So i really noticed it for the first time, which was interesting to me. These sculptures and paintings had been unconsciously influencing my developing work, and recently I’ve found myself circling back and revisiting them.
Tim works primarily in the realm of abstraction and has experimented all his life with painting and sculpture. Theres a sense of clarity and directness in his work, and material and concept are of equal importance, although i would say material takes precedence. He was really influenced by architecture, african art, shapes, jazz, tap dance, matisse, Cezanne, Polish Constructivists, Richard Serra, the list goes on.
He was very heavy into process and experimentation with material and media. Finding new ways to present narrative through the process of experimentation with combing painting and sculpture.
There’s a sort of complicated simplicity in his work (meaning forms that are very gestural but they have weight to them.) One thing thats really really interesting to me and i would have loved to ask him about were the fact that almost all of his works were vertical. It suggested a sort of figuration to these otherwise very abstract (yet clearly symbolic) pieces. …it also referenced architectural space.
His process is fascinating as well. See the thing about Tim is that he worked and worked and worked all his life on his art, every single day for 60+ years and even then he still couldn’t tell you exactly what or why he was doing what he was doing.
…Sure he had concepts and reasons and intentionality, but the things that he created, that full reasoning behind it was something that was very intangible and there wasn’t really a way of explaining it. Other than: He saw something, something that really only he could see and he just went and made work about it…for over 60 years. Thats FANTASTIC.
He was very about nature, he loved to spend time in nature. he lived in Chicago and went to school at the Art Institute, then he moved to New York, and started a publishing company (he loved to read) and he had a hut up in the cat skills where he would work and walk and explore and discover and build etc. etc.
A lot of his work deals with nature and found materials from nature and urban environments, he recycles old pieces into new pieces. and he (and this i think is something really important) he selects objects for their tactile and visual qualities, and they mostly in some way have a resemblance to primitive/ancient art.
Theres a lot of minimalism going on as well.
A lot of his work was interactive with the viewer in that you had to really look, walk around it, you really are kind of forced to explore content and structure, connections between form, space, color etc.
There was definitely a dialogue between object and image (which is something I’m trying to explore) and investigation of material, media, and surface, and he investigated relationships between painted space and shallow relief, often leading to a dialogue and investigation about how two and three dimensions worked with one another.
He is without a doubt one of my biggest inspirations.
and i really encourage all of you to check out his paintings, sculpture, mixed media work etc.
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