I practice painting as a means of investigation into the nature of perception; a challenge to reexamine memory and personal history; trying to absorb facts, construed fictions, and lost connections, while walking a fine line between representation and pure abstraction. The ongoing concern of that negotiation on canvas prompts me to not only search for meaning and nostalgia within the images, but to also locate concealed metaphors and associations via the enigmatic language of painting.

Most recently, the serial focus of my work is centered on the broad subject of my relationships with family, some appear as formal studies like the activity of bird watching that I shared with my kids. Others, employing construction marking flags indicating meaningful locations in my life that recount events experienced with those close to me.  Included in the work are images of traps, bath toys, kites, clothing patterns, post-it notes, Amyloid plaques, malfunctioning communication devices and various themes of forfeiture, thusly becoming a study of memory and place with a reckoning of isolative muteness and loss. 

Analagous to the way I remember incidences in my life, I attempt to blur the particulars while animating the more general, ultimately finding content through experimentation rather than forcing what I want to see. Formally, I am interested in repetition of form and reductive shapes and by creating a figure/ground relationship with those components, hope to both separate and connect the past and the present.

I’m very interested in painting as an activity, as much as I am in making images. It is of principal importance for me that the sum of the painting process is visible and evidently embraced. In my studio, painting represents the possibility of finding on canvas the beauty and sentiment with which I see.  As I fathom the depths of a painting and examine its surface, creating a visual contingency is more important than a visual certainty and hopefully the exhilaration and insight of discovery reigns.  This provisional pictorial field becomes a creative proving ground as I try to identify the grammar and inflection of my daily life and ultimately reveal to myself, in a genuine way, just who I am.

Timothy Hower