Artist About

Tim Cleary is a 25 year old Ohio born artist who was first inspired by the flat horizons of the Midwest and specifically Northwestern Michigan. He earned his B.A. at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he studied under Dana Saulnier and was awarded the '03 -'04 Richard and Leila Smith Scholarship.

He now resides in Denver Colorado where he exhibits his work through WalkerFineArt; at 11th Ave. and Cherokee in Denver's Golden Triangle, as well as a number of design centers and model homes in the area. Tim's work can also be found in private and corporate collections in New York, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, California, Florida, and Colorado.

Tim makes paintings that are for anyone from art history scholars, to kids, and even dogs who are willing to look long enough. Some of his stronger artistic influences include; Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, Albert Einstein, Vincent Willem VanGogh, Neils Bohr, Claude Monet, and Willem DeKooning.

“Science, Custom, and intuition all acknowledge that the right brain is the artistic side. Right–art –space belongs principally in one hemisphere. Yet, though art is contemplated and even inspired in a synthetic, holistic, all-at-once manner, the actual task or casting of a statue is left-brain work. It takes place one step at a time and depends on a sequential technique. The studio for the fabrication of art is located somewhere in the left brain, but the design center’s headquarters and creative offices are within the right.

Left-physics-time resides chiefly in one hemisphere. Just as art needs left-sided sequence, so physics depends upon right-sided inspiration. Visionary physicists frequently report that their insights occur in a flash of intuition: an epiphany that is at once nondiscursive, nonlogical, and authentic. In these cases, the painstaking labor necessary to shape each intuition into the language of mathematical proofs occurs after the insight. Einstein expressed this when he said, “Invention is not the product of logical thought, even though the final product is tied to a logical structure.” Despite these crossovers, the framework of physics consists of sequential, abstract, algebraic equations. Its infrastructure is that of logic and number, and its essence is that of a time line. Although one cannot completely assign something as broad and creative as the field of physics to only one side of the brain, nevertheless the intricate equation-driven work of physics proceeds for the most part in the time-dependent, science-oriented left hemisphere.”

- Leonard Shlain
- Art and Physics
- Pp. 424-425

My paintings are ready to change. I have trained myself through the use of photography to find subjectivity in what is inherently objective. As the division between “separate” images in my work becomes less clear, I am finding a way to depart from a conventional representation derived from the observation of reality. To me, the photograph is inherently a record of objective, visual reality. Even a photograph that represents nothing identifiable is born of specific circumstances that create and design it which are impossible to divorce from objectivity.

For a number of series of paintings, spanning about four years, I have used a recognizable, objective representation of reality for the structure and mask of what is subjective about my work. If objectivity is unavoidable when photography informs the way I paint, I want to find out what happens when the representational mask of my work looses its connection to what is identifiable. The images will remain connected to the forces that made them; light, time, color, and space (All parts of the theory of relativity). If objectivity is unavoidable then there is no reason for me to represent it outwardly in a painting. Where the pieces I have been working on recently have traced an objective reality over ideas that are fleeting and subjective, their depictions will be far more objectively relative, conceptual, and interpretive.

I have always enjoyed paintings that include a tactile representation of meteorology. Fredreich represents the objective canvases to the point that his paintings themselves become references to the “vault of heaven” through the representation of the infinite or, at least, visually immeasurable. Van Gogh also uses meteorology. His representations personify human drama and emotion through illustration of the seasons, to the time of day, or to the attitude of the weather. Monet’s “Haystack Series” represented this quality clearly to me, even at a very young age.

There is, for me, something in the way that the world around us, especially the sky, can be taken in so subjectively. The collective mood of a landscape is personified in “Mother Nature”. The functions, beauty, and cycles of weather, as represented by the sky, forms a fantastically universal metaphor. Who could disagree that a thunderstorm seems angry on one level or another? And yet, nature has such an absolute absence of any semblance of the many moods and symbols we attribute to it. “Mother Nature’s” motives are our own. We personify weather and nature because its indifference is quite difficult to come to grips with, and because it works as a metaphor for our own humanity. The way I paint is, at one time, a direct affirmation of naturalism, the joy of life lived, and the power of communication through metaphor. However, the way I paint is also a representation of indifference and infinity

The emotions and sentient experiences we have as people can seem quite universal. When a heart is breaking it is usually quick to assume that its burden is tragically unique. While it is true that no one can share the exact same experiences, people have their hearts broken all the time. The progression of emotions a person deals with as they experience loss has even been psychologically mapped and defined. To think of an emotion as somehow homogeneous through humanity is sometimes hard to avoid, and almost always depressing; in the sense that we all wrestle with a balance between acceptance and individuality.

However the extent that emotions can be examined as universal, the experience of them is always privately unique. Their construction cannot be reproduced. They are the differences in what may seem universal. It is somewhere in this paradox that I find possibility. Paradox is what makes communication both possible and inevitable. To paint is to fully embrace this paradox and to communicate what is universal through an individual or particular experience.

“The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is the belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight, or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading the morass of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of a Reality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it. This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to worship; it is felt to be always and everywhere close at hand, thinly veiled by the shows of sense, ready, for the receptive mind, to shine in its glory even through the apparent folly and wickedness of Man. The poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory: the haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun. But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision; what others dimly seek he know, with a knowledge beside which all other knowledge is ignorance.

The second characteristic of mysticism is its belief in unity, and it refusal to admit opposition of division anywhere. We found Heraclitus saying, “good and ill are one”; and again he says, “the way up and the way down is one and the same.” The same attitude appears in the simultaneous assertion of contradictory propositions, such as; “we step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.” The assertion of Parmenides, that reality is one and indivisible, comes from the same impulse towards unity. In Plato, this impulse is less prominent, being held in check by his theory ideas; but it reappears, so far as his logic permits, in the doctrine of the primacy of the Good.

A third mark of almost all mystical metaphysics is the denial of the reality of time. This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory. We have seen this doctrine prominent in Parmenides: and among moderns it is fundamental in the systems of Spinoza and Hegel.”

- Bertrand Russel
- Selected Papers; Mysticism and Logic
- pp. 26 - 27

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me." Isaac Newton (1687).

Any way I look at it, in any prism of thought, human life is a metaphor. The definitions and themes of life are conceptualized from a bigger picture woven from abstractions and a sense of history or myth. Life is our own gift, but it is also our own creation.

Such is the same in painting. What is before our eyes is as real as anything to us. Just as the things we do not see with our eyes are no less real, or present, for having not been interpreted visually. When we embrace these hidden abstractions with our emotions and language, only then, do we truly experience what is human and what makes a conscious life possible.

To believe in painting is to believe in metaphor and a life that is somehow clearer than objective reality. What we see is plagued with definition and relativity. What we experience, personally or socially, as metaphor, is without law or want of definition. It is self-defining, ever-present, and, above all else, undeniable. It is sentience and pure consciousness.

"No doubt the fourth dimension, properly speaking, is not at all something analogous with height, width, or depth, such as geometers understand these dimensions. It is another thing much more complex, much more abstract, which would not be able to be defined in any manner in our present language. Let us suppose, if you will, that it is a different point of view, a manner of envisaging things in their eternal and immutable aspect, a manner of freeing oneself from movement in quantity in order to conceive only the single artistic quality of phenomena…When one reaches the country of the forth dimension, when one is freed forever from the notions of space and time, it is with this intelligence that one thinks and reflects. Thanks to it, one finds himself (herself) blended with the entire universe, with so-called future events, as with so called past events."
-Gaston de Pawlowski
-"Voyage to the Country of the Fourth Dimension"
-1912

Time is something people take quite for granted, and yet it remains a mystery to us. To me, classical progression of time is a symbol of death. The sand of the hourglass flows in one direction until it has all fallen to a state of rest. Modern art and modern physics both seek out and signify breaks with this strictly linear concept of time. This makes them a symbol of life, because life to the naturalist is not progressive, in the sense that its "end-points" are cyclic symbols and points of new beginnings. This is precisely what I enjoy about naturalism.

Nature is by no means static. We use many different tools and methods of thought to gauge how time can bring about unimaginable change to systems much older then us. But, time is our own construct that we apply to the forces we personify as "Mother Nature". However, nature in its purest sense has no sense of time, because it is time. When I paint the natural world I embrace that which is in constant flux. Death is not the end of any timeline; it is a part of something that is far less rigid and much, much bigger.
Einstein invented circumstances where time operates much the same way it does in art. He was, in every sense, the ultimate conceptual artist. His vision was relative and subject to proof through interpretation. The speed of light is more abstract than any painting by Pollock or Rothko, and yet, it is just as real as any painting. His brush is mathematical and a description of plasticity, but his theme is about something bigger. It is in this sense that he is the ultimate naturalist; the ultimate affirmer of life through the denial of real "endings". His work supports a state where timelessness can become possible.

Humans are born with out their senses of sight completely intact. Physically, as the head grows, the eyes move farther and farther apart. This delays the brain's ability to learn how to combine two separate views into one (binocular vision). The eyes work but the brain needs time to calibrate itself. The interpretation of visual information takes time to organize. Even depth needs to be decoded and programmed. Some animals are born with their vision biologically "finished"; rabbits are an example. For small prey like this the ability to flee is an obvious survival advantage.

While we as people enter this world without much of our sight developed, babies are born with the ability to recognize faces. It has been stated that a child may recognize its mother's face by the second day of life. We are capable of this recognition before we can see real depth or object orientation. People also seem quick to see faces in many things other than people. The organization of facial features is recognizable in all kinds of abstractions and even in natural forms like mountains or clouds.

The human face is not what my painting alludes to, explains, or expounds upon in any direct way. What interests me, and structures the design of my work, is the kind of visual recognition that is possible before the mind fully interprets what it sees. Composition precedes representation. The imagery of my painting is a realistic mask, hiding the innate, naïve vision that forms the recognizable "face" of my work.