Timothy Barr
Contemporary American Artist
A Collection of paintings by Timothy Barr
A statement describing what my art is about:
All my paintings are oil paint on panels, painted in the luminist tradition (many thin transparent layers of paint usually put down wet over dry, depending on the effect I’m after). The oil paint is thinned using linseed oil to the point of letting the color below shine through. I’ve used up to five layers of color on some areas of my paintings. This creates complex colors and can give a glow to the finished painting. It also can create the illusion of depth.
Painting is a tradition that our species started as far back as the cave paintings found in France. These were done some 30,000 years ago. We are still doing the same thing with our modern paintings. Why would we keep repeating this process? I think it’s because it speaks to our base emotions and our need for beauty and order in a disorderly world. Color and light are high language tools. They express things that connect to the part of our brains that deal with base emotions. There is rhythm in the way a line is drawn much the same way a chord is struck in music. I gravitate to the color and light of the Barbizon school of painters of the 19th century. I use what they brought to the art world as a departure point and by adding my own sense of light and color hopefully I can create a new way of seeing this world. Attention to the kind of brushstroke I make is crucial to developing a rhythm in a painting as well as describing form, mood, movement…I think this rhythm that artists strive for in their paintings is key to unlocking the part of the viewers brain that reacts favorably to beauty, much like music. I try to do this without falling into the usual pitfalls of realist art i.e. overly sentimental or merely photographic.