Timothy Tompkins

My ideas about art-making reflect a combination of concepts: the material nature of painting and how the viewer perceives its surface, the history of painting as a medium, abstraction, memory, representation, and technology. The work is executed on 1/8″ thick aluminium panels using high gloss commercial enamels that enhance the liquid qualities of paint. The liquid state of paint is more evident with enamel paint because when dry, the traced contours of the image remain. This quality gives a transitory effect to the piece, as if the image is still forming. The colour photograph that I use as a source for painting is reduced to its basic twelve to fifteen colours in an effort to abstract it.

Onto the stripped down form of the photographic image, I then build up paint so that the painting vacillates between the vagueness of the image and the specificity caused by the physicality of the paint itself. The paintings attempt to deal with the perception of images through the use of the specific material of the medium. The gloss enamel is not only a signifier for the material nature of the paint, but is also the vehicle in which the form is represented. I create my paintings within the “language” of painting. Conscious of my use of historical references, the work does not try and disguise the fact that it is painting, an object with a long and complex history.
See biography

Leftovers

Temporal Arcadia

Installations

Leftovers


  • Leftovers Spring 09 v.19, 2009

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    122 x 152,5 cm


  • Leftovers Spring 08 v.1 (After Morandi), 2009

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    81,3 x 91,5 cm


  • Leftovers Autumn 07 v.1 (After Morandi), 2008

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    81,3 x 91,5 cm

Temporal Arcadia


  • 2.26.07 (After Freidrich), 2008

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    152,2 x 216 cm


  • 1.25.07 (After Lorraine), 2008

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    91,5 x 132 cm


  • 4.22.06 (After David), 2006

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    243,8 x 424,7 cm


  • 2,7.06 (After Turner), 2006

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    127 x 165 cm


  • 5.12.07 (After Corot), 2008

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    122 x 183 cm


  • 9.29.07 (After Constable), 2008

    Industrial enamel on aluminum
    153 x 206 cm

Installations


  • Temporal Arcadia, 2009

    Installation view
    Studio La Città, Verona


  • Temporal Arcadia, 2009

    Installation view
    Studio La Città, Verona


  • Temporal Arcadia, 2009

    Installation view
    Studio La Città, Verona