Tim Grosvenor Art: February 2008

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