SOVER SCENE: Painting as performance
Tim Allen shifts dynamic between artist and viewer
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Totem (detail) 33 x 60 oil on dibond, by Tim Allen who will be creating a painting, live and in-person, during gallery hours at the Windham Art Gallery in Brattleboro through November 2nd. |
Toolbox
By ANNE LAWRENCE GUYON - Published: October 16, 2008
Of solitude, Claude Monet once said, "One's better off alone and yet there are so many things that are impossible to fathom on one's own. In fact it's a terrible business and the task is a hard one."
Putney painter Tim Allen has been thinking about this issue. Working alone in his studio during the past year on a bold series of large oil paintings based on birch trees and bamboo, Allen has reflected on the typical mandate of the artist to toil in solitude, the role of the viewer to observe the work once it is complete and ways that those two roles might intersect.
He's decided to shake up this standard dichotomy of creation versus response, transforming the Windham Art Gallery in Brattleboro into a temporary studio and making a painting from scratch in the hallowed environs where art lovers expect to see finished works safely hung (and dry).
The show, which runs through Nov. 2, will therefore include Allen who will be in the gallery painting during regular business hours, Thursday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. — surrounded by six finished works. An opening reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday.
The idea to integrate the act of painting with the exhibit itself came from a curiosity about the role of the witness in creative endeavors, how spectators influence artists and whether the work evolves differently when an observer is present.
"I often feel fairly isolated at my studio," says Allen. "I realized that I'm working alone most of the time so I reflected on the work of performance artists and imagine how they might be fed by having an audience there. There's certainly a different energy."
He went on to describe theatrical events in which the dynamic between the viewer and the viewed can be, in and of itself, mutually cathartic.
"I like performers who perform in very intimate settings and create a real synergy with the audience, like Sandglass Theater," he explains, referring to the popular puppetry ensemble in Putney whose performance space is comparatively small. "It has an intimacy that's very sweet."
"I was thinking of how little our process is visible and it got me wondering if painting in a more social setting might affect my mood."
When I asked whether input from gallery goers will be welcome, he was enthusiastic about the notion. "I will be open to comments from people and part of what I feel excited about is the possibility of interactions that might happen and how they could influence the work. It might not be any interaction related to painting but just having a conversation about something specific."
Allen first began painting in earnest at age 9, when his parents gave him a full set of oil paints at the behest of a beloved art teacher at a community center near where he grew up in Florida.
"I sold my first painting at age 11, to friends of my parents, and painted all through high school," he recalled. While attending the Parson's School of Design in New York City, he became focused on medical illustration and then shifted to industrial design. "Eventually, I stopped to figure out who I was behind my artist identification and explored other aspects of life."
Taking a few years off from artistic pursuits to become a certified massage therapist while living in Boston, Allen was ultimately able to redefine what art meant to him and life took him full circle back to the studio. This inventive use of a gallery exhibit is, therefore, part of a larger personal and professional progression with possibilities that are both invigorating and healing.
"Another aspect is that, when I was young, art was a bit of performance," he acknowledges. "My mom would ask me to paint a pretty picture for my grandmother, so I felt like I wasn't really being seen for who I was. It was praise that wasn't terribly satisfying."
"So when I started painting again, I didn't want to paint for other people's approval. It was a question of 'can I show who I am and not just be pleasing to other people, can I be visible or do I get lost in the presentation of the process?' This is a way of challenging myself, where there's a bit of tension with putting it out there and risk-taking. And I like connecting with people."
The work in progress takes place in the context of a comprehensive exhibit which showcases Allen's inventive approach to painterly methods and composition. Each deftly rendered panel, some of which are three feet high and six feet or more wide, is filled edge to edge by trunks and branches with neither roots nor tips visible.
Forests of delicate white-and-black limbs are cropped along the top and bottom, resulting in images that read as compelling, enlarged details of larger paintings. By closing his aperture on specific aspects of common natural scenery, we see the environment anew, reconsidering patterns, volume and textures via shifts in depths of field and focus.
Another absorbing pictorial device that Allen employs is the balancing of subject and context through a decidedly innovative means of bestowing supposedly negative space with as much import as multidimensional elements. Vivid skies are treated with the same regard for shape and modulation as dense branches, so that they command a visual presence equal to the limbs that dissect them.
In "Fantasy in Three," varying tones of blue are divided into brilliant mosaics of slightly altered hues, resulting in a patchwork of refracted light like a glimmering yet monochromatic stained glass window.
Throughout the show, flat surface is as crucial and thoughtfully worked as shading, light and texture, so that a section of air holds our interest as much as a deftly limned twig or patch of papery bark. In some cases, purposefully executed, organically shaped sections of sky overlay leaves, impossibly yet evocatively, as if a strong breeze is moving through the room; the only thing missing is the sound of rustling.
"I had the idea of treating spaces between intersecting branches almost like objects," Allen attests.
"I just started playing with that idea of atmosphere as object and started working with different spaces. I ended up going back and forth between trees and atmosphere and it became a push-pull. The part that excited me was the edges and how they create a tension between what's going on in the foreground and what's going on behind it."
"I often paint the tree first and bring sky through," he continues. "Confusing the viewer about what's object and what's atmosphere creates movement, vibrancy and energy."
This bending of rules — visual, professional and social — comes from one core well of courage, with which Allen challenges the traditional trinity of art, studio and patron.
Leonardo Da Vinci believed that, "If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself." But by allowing viewers behind the veil, Allen is augmenting the aesthetic possibilities of his work yet further, with visitors' dialogue infiltrating his methodology and his willingness to make his technique transparent affecting how the end result might be perceived.
It's a rare opportunity for both artist and art lover to enter into a meaningful, symbiotic relationship.
Online: www.timallenart.com
www.windhamartgallery.com
Annie: www.annieguyoncommunications.com
Archive: www.rutlandherald. typepad.com/soverscene
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