Snow Egg for Elephant Bird Egg Project

Ancient Towers

A Beautiful Day

Self Portraits 2005 - 2006

Self Portaits 2005 - 2006

Having just seen a short film about Michael Landy and his portrait drawings I was encouraged to put up on this blog several of the images I made between 2005 and 2006. The paintings in the composite image above were all made using a series of self-portrait photographs taken by the subjects themselves The images are either oil on canvas or waterclour). I then took these images and made portraits out of them. I was very interested in the difference between portraits made of people looking at me as an artist as against making images out of other people's self-portraits. When the subjects were taking the photographs of themselves they look very differently into the blank eye of the camera as against looking at the artist. I felt when working on the photographs that they had taken of themselves that it was as if they were looking into the abyss.

Red Wall and Bowls

Red Bowl

The Show

Hochformat 40 x 150

Portrait Landscape

Recent Work

After a period of rest and recuperation in the South West of France I am now back in Switzerland and busy working once again. The most recent piece of work, seen above, is another sphere painting that will soon be on exhibition at the Erlengut, Seminar and Kulturzentrum, Erlenbach near Zurich from Friday 12th September through to Sunday 21st September. These sphere pieces are still in a state of evolution but I am extremely happy with the way they are developing. As someone recently expressed to me, "they are as if someone has taken a bicycle pump to pointelist painting". These peices are not in any sense frivolous to me but I do hope that they make people perhaps smile.

Square Spheres

Complex Structure 2

At the moment I am somewhat obsessed by spheres. I have no real idea why but there it is. I am spending enormous amounts of time putting small sculptures together. The most recent of which is Flower 1. The molecular flower.

Iceberg

Iceberg

Three years ago I decided to make an egg out of ice. This piece was made for the Fete Du Nòuef in St Antonin Noble Val in the south west of France. The idea was simple. I would use two molds to make a solid ice egg that would then melt in normal atmospheric conditions. With the help of Andre Laban, the great diving pioneer (and engineer) we managed to construct the egg in his deep freeze. The egg measured 52 x 38 x 38. The egg was then placed in a perspex box and left to melt. The egg took approximately 82 hours to melt. My plan is to place many of these eggs around the world, linked by web-cams to see them melt in different conditions. You see I love ice, and I would rather that the the ice that we have on this planet does not melt.

Grey Circles

From Above

The Dark House

In the Shadows

Wider Line of Bowls

Génétique Moleculair

Charcoal Egg

As a part of the annual Egg Festival in St Antonin Noble Val, France (La Fete du N'oeuf) I contributed two works for the exhibition. The Molecular Egg (Génétique Moléculair) won first prize for the jury selection and the Charcoal Egg was awarded second prize.

Back Bowls

Painting is an act of hope. Hope that every time a canvas is prepared something will emerge that has life. Order & Chaos is not a title for a specific series of paintings it is an overarching phrase that accounts for the work of Tim Grosvenor over the past several years regardless of the specific content or image. The phrase describes the space in which this artist works. Not the physical space but the mental and emotional space. This polarity also represents the line that the artist treads between the worlds of figuration and abstraction. “I want to create spaces that are new to people and yet strangely familiar. It strikes me that everything lies in this state of organised chaos. If the balance swings too far in either direction there is a loss of harmony.”
Tim counts amongst his major influences artists such as Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Elsworth Kelly, Morandi and Mondrian. “There is so much art that has become the product of the great industrialised machinery of the 20th Century and yet when you see a tiny Morandi or a Sol LeWitt you realise that simple methods of paint, chalk and canvas can generate such power. I am not in the business of opening a factory for art.”
The struggle for many artists is to find a language that is their own, a style or an image. In the post-modern era the pluralism that has emerged from the wreckage of idealism has generated art that is often about shock but without cultural optimism. A cynicism that is revealed in work that claims to be ironic. But painting still survives and although this may reflect, in a marxist analysis, the continuing power of capitalism to defend the notion of possessions it is also true that painting in a world of brands and repetition still holds our attention.
“When I am working I am happy. The excitement of not knowing where a painting will lead keeps me going even if the end result often defeats my expectations. It is also the case that whereas the conceptual work is a kind of food for the brain, painting is food for the stomach. It doesn’t matter sometimes if the painting is a disaster. The very act of manipulating a material is sustaining.”
Tim has a degree in Fine Arts and was awarded the Owen Ridley Prize for drawing at the University of Reading. He has exhibited extensively in France and the UK and in the Spring of 2007 showed a large collection of his work in the Flemish Parliament in Brussels. His work is held in many private collections throughout Europe, the United States and Australia.
These new paintings have evolved through a long term exploration of form. This work has its origins in a series of figurative paintings of some brightly coloured plates he found lying in a store room. “For some reason I was drawn to this pile of plates, like the fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea. Some of the paintings are stable whilst others are almost collapsing. To me this is just like life. The curve fascinates me. Everything is in nature is curved to some degree or other, even space itself.” The work has now become detached from naturalistic painting although there is always a sense that we are looking at something we recognise but that it has become something else.
20th February 2008
TG

The City

Dark Oil

Dark Chaos

Small Red Square

Gentle Bowls on Grey

Dark and Light

Mixed Yellow & Grey Bowls

Long Red Bowls

Cave Bowls

Red Cylinder

Line of Bowls

Large Red Bowls

Red Lined Bowls

Over the last five months since moving to Switzerland I have been trying to sharpen the focus of my work. This weekend I have been showing 20 new paintings and drawings. I have put up a few images from this new collection for those of you who could not be here to see the paintings in the flesh, so to speak.