The more accessible art is to the public, the more we can hope to educate and enhance the lives of a few at a time. Whether it is accomplished through schools, government programming, non-profit organizations, or a combination, it is important to realize the benefits. An artist’s obligation to society is to create work that will challenge us all to keep an open mind. Objects of art, whether it is a painting, photographs, sculptures, or a piece of pottery can evoke emotions and feelings that become meaningful to us. If art were left alone in a dark room, than so would society be in a dark room itself. The artists of today are certainly not the artists we study. All of the rules have been changed; in fact there are no rules. There are only concepts.               

  Somewhere along the line in my life I picked up the four rules of life and making clay art:
1. Show up
2. Pay attention
3. Tell the truth
4. Don’t get attached to the results.

 We want to create and work, hopefully, on the edge of life. “If you are not working on the edge, you are taking up too much room.”  We must make the pieces that fail, so we can produce the work that we are most proud of. The failed pieces become our tools to success.  I like making clay art. The transference of information through my work helps me educate and share what I feel is important.   The form is the essence of the clay. I choose identifiable forms, pots that in another setting perhaps would be functional. A level of consciousness, beyond simple recognition, is required if one is to open their mind and heart to what we call art. When I decided to break away from the form and fire, I faced a conscious level that I may not have understood at the time. Creating a surface for the form by painting an image, was not something I had ever done before.

 The choice of using botanical illustrations was not intended to decorate with pretty flowers, but rather embellish the surface with a reaction to plants and nature. The style in which I paint these images comes from my background as a printmaker. I get up every morning, and go to the studio to work on something I find very difficult to explain. I tend the fire, so the flame does not go out. How do I know if the work is good, most of the time this is not an intellectual response, but rather a sensation, something you feel within you.

 

Tim at Santa Fe Spring Arts Festival 2012