Tim Hawkesworth

“In Ireland the sky hurries over you. It is on its way, directed, always moving. It remembers the heat of the great plains of America where it slowed, turning its intensity to a still hum, the vibration of an oven. Then the choppy turns and stormy marriage with the water – the endless Atlantic – and at last those fingers of land, a mere whisper below. It hurries past, pulled by the grandeur of the Alps, looking for something worthy of its scale.  On its way it slowed down over the rich land of southern England and France. But Ireland is just a wild place to pass over. Incidental. Small fry. A taste of land after the trauma of endless ocean. 

This makes the Irish quick and alert, accustomed to change, to movement, to swollen rivers and changing light. History, poverty and oppression combined to make us migratory. The weather just mirrors this truth. We are blown around. All over the place.

I grew up in a valley where you see the speed of the sky – it is delineated by the mountains either side – it races by.  Higher up on the open hill, it surrounds you – you are fully exposed – buffeted. 

The valley is pulled at by the river – dragging at its banks – carrying off debris – the fallen trees, the loose earth – anything not well rooted. This is the place that formulated me. It is here, in my memory of this place, that I find my freedom, my doorway, and my paintings – a way past the confines of myself.

We are all visitors – just stopping by – migrating in consciousness – on the move whether we know it or not. Behind all our great monuments and civilizations and our accumulations of power and wealth, this truth prevails. It colors our achievements with pathos. It leads us to those moments of seeing when the movement of it all catches us up and lays us out. It lays us out in a more spacious grassland and it is here that we can home to a deeper intelligence – a knowing that is closer to the wisdom of the heart than of the constructs of the mind.

Our creativity is old in us. It is primal – deep in our nature. Our art is not the product of civilization, of curators, of universities, of canons of learning, of culture. It prefigures it.  The creative spark comes first. Drawing and painting are as old as song and every word we speak, everything we have and use, comes from this spark – from the intuit – from the dream – from our wandering imagination – from our migratory beings.  An old Native American (Ojibway) proverb goes, “sometimes I go about pitying myself and all along my soul is being blown by great winds across the sky.”

TH 2014

Biography

Tim Hawkesworth grew up in Ireland and immigrated to the US in 1977.  He has exhibited paintings and drawings in the United States and Europe since the early 1980s, including numerous solo shows in New York, NY.  His work has received considerable critical attention including reviews in the New York Times, Art News, the New Yorker, the LA Times, the Boston Globe and the Irish Times.  His work is in many public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Dublin City Hugh Lane Gallery.  His writing has been published by several art magazines and he has been teaching workshops across the United States since 1990.

Hawkesworth is represented by Littlejohn Contemporary in New York, Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Hillsboro Fine Art in Dublin, Ireland.  Hawkesworth recently had a solo exhibit at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland and they will show his new triptych; Searching for Rumi’s Field, November through December 2014.

Reception: October 11th 2014 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Artist’s Talk: October 11th 2014 3:30pm