Tim Steele “Building into Painting”

SLA307

poster for Tim Steele “Building into Painting”
[Image: Tim Steele "Push Comes To Shove" (2017) Oil on Panels, 90 x 105 in.]

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Sla307 presents a solo exhibition of recent constructed paintings by Tim Steele entitled Building into Painting. Since Steele’s inaugural 1999 solo exhibition in New York City he has been creating commercial and private installations locally and abroad as well as exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions.

Tim Steele writes:
After decades of exploring a full spectrum of painting, I’ve come to understand that the act of building in some form is linked to my desire to create. I was raised in a family of skilled craftsmen, mechanics, and fabricators, and my painting process acknowledges this tradition of practical labor and functional application, recognizing it as an important element of self-expression.

For this reason, I’m most engaged when construction is either incorporated into the painting process or when I’m designing the environment in which the paintings are ultimately displayed. Working at the intersection of painting, collage, and relief sculpture, I don’t believe that the literal building of the pieces can be separated from the “loftier” endeavor of painting; rather, I believe that process is content.

Painting is how I communicate on a sensuous plane in order to share a visual experience. It’s a way to invite the viewer to see and feel what I see and feel, even if it’s a single passage in the work. It might be something as simple as how a brushstroke fragment, when juxtaposed with a solid color, collides in opposing energies, or how two accidental forms “rhyme” and connote a third when placed in proximity. In some pieces, I alternately compress the painting’s visual space to its surface and expand that surface to three dimensions, holding the picture planes in check through relationships of color, gestural marks, and transparency.

I also describe abstracted experiences from my environment. A cityscape is implied when flowing lines and forms are suddenly interrupted by the hard edge of a saw-cut panel, or when a slice of color is wedged between two planes layered with graffiti-like marks, suggesting the view between urban towers.

I construct my pieces by applying paint to large plywood sheets that are cut into workable-sized panels. To begin a piece, I arrange the various painted panels on the floor as a collage and continue cutting them as the painting progresses; any valuable scrap is recycled for future work. The loose components are assembled in a shop and returned to the studio, as an object with its own gravity, occupying a different visual space than a painting on canvas. Because of the assembled surfaces, a portion of the painting’s spatial illusion is transformed into a tactile three-dimensional form.

Although I continue to paint on the pieces after they are assembled, I experience some sense of completion – and even reward – the moment they arrive from the shop. It’s a fulfillment of that primary need to build as well as communicate through painting, the content realized through its fabricated form.

Media

Schedule

from February 03, 2017 to March 17, 2017

Opening Reception on 2017-02-03 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Tim Steele

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