Artist Statement.
Tim Tyler
I am a comic performer who paints. Thirty years ago while performing in Berlin at the Wintergarten, I found a blank canvas lying on the footpath at Hackescher Markt. I picked it up, took it home and have been painting ever since.
With no sketches beforehand, each painting is created directly on the canvas. Covering things that don’t work, I build the scene with layers of paint. Moving the forms around, I battle to adjust the colours, adding and removing detail until it all fits together.
My paintings are like friends, companions with whom I discuss, dream and transform feelings and ideas, into symbolic images that are stories celebrating life and our differences.
I have not had any formal art training. I have learnt to follow my heart. The scenes I create are stylized, theatrical, whimsical and oddly musical. Figures float, sometimes intertwining. Perspective is often set aside.
In each setting there are clues hinting where I have been and what was on my mind; a Tahitian beach, a Tuscan hill town, the Garden of Eden. The paintings are therefore like pages from a journal. They celebrate a joy, curiosity and wonder in being human, coloured by my love of the absurd.
I work with acrylic paint on large un-stretched canvases. Acrylic dries quickly and can be rolled up for travelling, essential to my life as a nomadic performing artist.